


THE GIRL WITH THE STARDUST EYES

by fulcrumstardust



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blood and Injury, Broken People Falling In Love, Cassian in Uniform, Did I mention Cassian wearing uniform?, Everybody needs therapy, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Gratuitous mention of Stardust, Heavy Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Imperial Jyn Erso, Major Character Injury, Moral Ambiguity, Poetic spatial sex (or something), Porn with Feelings, Shifting Allegiance, Spy Cassian Andor, Suicidal Thoughts, Technically Virgin Jyn (but patriarchy is dead in space), That backstory of Nath Tensent's Squadron no one asked for, Undercover Missions, Unhealthy amount of Mutual Pining, by popular demand this is now a multichapter, good is not nice, unhealthy everything, you only have yourself to blame
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-28
Updated: 2021-02-20
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:35:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 39,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21595456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fulcrumstardust/pseuds/fulcrumstardust
Summary: In the obsidian space, Imperial Lt. Jyn Erso meets undercover agent "Jeron Sward". And everything starts to crumble around them.
Relationships: Cassian Andor/Jyn Erso
Comments: 348
Kudos: 458





	1. Accidental Lovers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The beginning of the storm.
> 
> Update 16/12/20: chapter beta'ed by [imsfire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/imsfire/pseuds/imsfire) ❤️

****

**01\. Accidental lovers**

**›** Lay your heart into my perfect machine

I will use it to protect you from me

I will never let you see what's beneath

So good for you and good for me

We told ourselves we like where we ought to be **‹**

_**D-182** _

Everything was a mess: her mind, her focus, her convictions, her entire world.

Everything had broken into pieces because of Jeron Sward.

It all came crashing down into flames for Jyn Erso when she took her posting aboard the _Basilisk—_ a Star Destroyer serving under Captain Mullinore. It should have been nothing but a great opportunity for her, her first real assignment.

Jyn was a competent navigating officer, the best of her division. She knew how to run trajectory equations and flight algorithms faster than anyone else. She knew how to spot counterfeit identifications and illegal ship signatures. Yes, Jyn was exceptionally good at her job _—_ her superiors were pleased with her work. For the first time in her life, people didn't see her as the daughter of a prime Imperial scientist but as Senior Lieutenant Jyn Erso, 10th Fleet, 88th Division, Imperial Space Navy.

Everything should have been great.

It _wasn’t_.

It wasn’t anything like she had so long envisioned. The missions… the Empire; it tasted sour and bitter in her mouth. Was it what her father worked for with such fierceness? Was it everywhere the same, all there was to it? Jyn couldn’t control the tremor in her chest anymore, ashamed and terrified by her own traitorous thoughts, each time she would see more of that dreadful wrath the _Basilisk_ carried with her everywhere in the Galaxy.

She had relentless nightmares about it. She couldn’t close her eyes without seeing molten pieces of ships burning into the dark obsidian space, corpses floating into the void like particles of dust, frozen into their brutal deaths. Whenever they would come to face the Star Destroyer, their distress calls haunted her over the comms.

Captain Mullinore wouldn’t take prisoners, wouldn’t let them escape either. The _Basilisk_ left no survivor to warn others, only phantoms and regrets.

Each time Jyn was tasked to analyze the clearance code of a new starship, she secretly prayed for them to be who they claimed to be _—_ because she would have to be the one voicing out loud the death sentence.

She hadn’t known how personal it would be, how cruel, and she couldn’t take it anymore.

That’s how it began at first: that one time Jeron Sward found her completely wasted and crying her misery out on the lower-deck. Mind you, drinking on shift was a serious violation of naval regulations. Not to mention the illicit way she had acquired her liquor (better than the cheap stuff they served at the mess). Jyn was in deep trouble and expected Sward to report her to her CO. She would get a strike; she could even get herself kicked out of the Navy if she tried hard enough.

No— Jyn Erso wasn’t a quitter. She couldn’t dishonor her father like that.

Besides, Sward never reported her _—_ even had the fucking audacity to ask if she was okay instead. How was this for a question? She wanted to scream at him, to lash out and punch her fists into his chest.

_I gave the confirmation, it was me. I killed those people. What do you mean 'are you okay?'_

She didn't say it.

Something strange happened between them instead; she still hadn’t quite figured how.

Jeron Sward was an austere man, distant and unapologetic. She had only seen him a handful of times around the _Basilisk,_ always clad in an impeccable grey uniform, his coverchief reglementarily angled over his line of sight like a warning. He was the type of man to always be in charge of the situation, she figured. He certainly looked the part. They wouldn’t mix, he worked above her clearance and they weren’t in the same department (her in the CIC, him with the Master-at-Arms). Yet, somehow, Jyn found something else in his deep brown eyes that night. The comfort, the warmth, the closeness… The touch, the kiss, the heat. It took them by surprise and left them both stunned.

She told herself it was a one-time thing. It wasn’t. Now, it was out of control.

She didn’t understand what he saw in her, didn’t understand why he sought her intimacy as he did. One time was a mistake, two times—

Jeron Sward wasn’t a man to repeat a mistake, so it might have been something else. Deep down, Jyn told herself that he might have been as lonely and hurting as she was, left jagged and broken by everlasting violence. It might have even been true. Jyn didn’t know much about men; she wasn't delusional enough to think she could understand this one.

She had just turned twenty and had spent all of her younger years training at the Imperial Academy on Coruscant. It never allowed her much time for sex, let alone for romance. She didn’t tell him the first time because it didn’t matter to her. If he noticed, which he probably did, he didn’t care either. He showed her how to touch him, how to enjoy it, how to forget that the whole damn world was on fire while they fucked each other like starved souls.

He kept on teaching her how to be his lover then, and Jyn started to learn how to be his partner instead.

Each time she would leave his bunk, naked and flushed, Jyn would feel herself sinking lower and deeper into that same spiral of dark void she tried so desperately to suppress into his flesh. It was the crux of it all; _just like her,_ Jeron Sward was exceptionally good at his job. And his job was to be an Imperial officer; his job was to _kill_ the people Jyn would flag as their enemies. If she couldn’t forgive herself, she certainly couldn’t forgive him either.

She hated herself even more for the comfort he brought her each time he held her, for the way he would get under her skin with just the right words and a promise in his eyes. All too soon, love and hate started to blur together like colliding stars to blind her senses.

This inferno had no end, she realized, and no matter how hard she tried to tell herself she was doing it for the right reasons, it didn’t let her sleep any better at night. Worse: it made her hate Sward every time a little more. The way he would look at her with a softer expression, the way he would take her hand, almost like he _cared_ about her, almost like he knew. The way he would make love to her as if he wanted to give her oblivion _just for a moment—_ even if Jyn had never spoken those thoughts to him.

She wouldn’t, of course. It was _treason._ But what if he knew, regardless?

She needed it to end to protect herself, to stop indulging that growing feeling before it was too late. It made her weak; it made her at risk (she should have never fraternized with a commissioned officer in the first place). That, too, was an unpinned grenade ready to go off.

She had it all planned: everything she would say, or rather not say.

But it was easier to persuade herself when she wasn’t near him, because when she was… it was like a spell, or maybe like a curse. Jyn started to remember the warmth of his touch, the caress of his lips, and she operated like a drug addict seeking her next thrill.

Her favorite part was to strip him from his symbols of authority and death, to uncover the passion under the iciness of his appearance. She palmed him through his uniform, hard and ready and eager to have her. She tugged at his collar, unbuttoning the jacket and disrespecting the metal pin of his rank insignia like revenge. He jerked into her touch and bit her earlobe with a low grunt when she slid her hand into his pants. She wasn't good, she thought, not like he was, not with his ease. But she was good enough to mess up his breathing and to feel the pulse of his nervous body into her palm. She was good enough to have him close his fingers around her wrist and ask for more with a hushed plea.

And they undressed, and they kissed, and they moaned as if they were one.

Jyn lost her breath, her fingers wound into his short brown hair, his head between her legs and his hands bruising the pale skin of her thighs. He gripped her with too much force: like a hostage, like a prisoner, but she allowed him all the same. He showed her what he could do to her just with his tongue, running up and down, kissing her, sucking her, fucking her. Hot and humid and soft. He pressed her hips down, hard, her legs over his shoulders, open and subjected to his power. Jyn gasped for air, feeling like her heart would stop at any given time from the strain of pleasure. She arched her back, one hand coming to press on the wall by the end of the bunk. Her head fell back and she opened her eyes, looking through a single viewport opening on the infinity of the Galaxy.

Stranded in the midst of the Maw Cluster, red giants and interstellar gas glowing, a faint amber reflected into her wide-open eyes when she fell apart and cried out the name of a man who didn’t feel like a stranger anymore. The ecstasy he brought to her was sucked deep into her core like a gravity well, and if Jyn had floated into deep space, she, too, would have attracted her own debris of stardust.

But she was pushed down into the thin mattress of a single cot, kept in place by the artificial gravity of the _Basilisk,_ sharing her filtered oxygen with someone that didn’t feel like a threat anymore. Jyn trembled and whimpered, his solid hands mapping her body like a permanent extension of her nerves. She did the same to him, to learn and to remember.

Where her skin was almost intact and virginal, he was scarred and marked. She wondered without repulsion what he had done to get such deep scars, why they hadn’t been erased with medical procedures. Maybe he didn’t want to—maybe he wanted to learn and to remember, too.

Jyn kissed him with all she had to offer. She wasn’t so new to this anymore. She knew what he liked; she knew how to bite his lips, how to caress his tongue, how to make him want more and moan into her breath. She dug her nails into his back, feeling the sweat pooling between his shoulders, down his spine, his skin so hot that it burned like a searing fire against her own. A fire vibrant enough to forget the coldness of the outer space in his arms.

She rolled onto her stomach, his chest pressed flat on her back as he kissed her neck and bit her shoulder. Her hair was damp and slick between her shoulder blades. He brushed it aside with one hand, his fingers curling into the brown locks. Jyn listened to his rapid breathing in her ear, almost matching the rhythm of her heartbeat. She moved her body under him to merge their forms together; to not be alone, to not be so small and vulnerable. As long as she was with him, she was stronger, she was bolder, she was worth _something._

She was worthy of the need in his eyes.

He gripped her hips and pushed into her with a pleading sound, only matched by her own voice breaking past her kiss-swollen lips. The stretch of his presence would linger long after they’d parted, she had learned. Jyn didn’t have any data for comparison. She wondered if it was pure physiology or if her rebellious body required her to remember him, just to make her come back and beg for more.

He built up a gentle pace at first, his hands on either side of her waist, holding her, bending her, grounding her. His lips were in her hair, on her nape, on her cheek when she turned her face to the side. She couldn’t kiss him but she grabbed his neck with one hand, the other in front of her to brace herself.

Jyn felt the rush of blood coloring her cheeks, down her entire body, between her legs, where their bodies touched and merged in unison. His gentle pressure turned into long steady thrusts, fully engorged into her heat. She tried to keep her voice down, aware that they shouldn’t have been fraternizing like this.

If she was caught with him… well, Jyn didn’t care anymore. He didn’t seem to mind either, low groans leaving his throat as his pace became more urgent, more demanding. Long gone the distant restraint and the placid expression. Stripped from his Imperial uniform, Sward was a man made of flesh and blood just like the rest of them—if only when he was fucking her. And though she didn’t know what, Jyn knew that he, too, was looking to forget something unspeakable in their fabricated euphoria.

One of his hands slid between her stomach and the mattress, gliding between her legs to make her toes curl from unrestrained lust.

He spoke words she didn’t understand into her ear; his deep, alluring voice closing like velvet around her folding body, coaxing her into abandon. Jyn muffled her cries into his pillow, the sizzling tension in her muscles ready to snap taut. His palm pressed into her, his fingers parting her folds, slick and slippery from arousal. He slammed his hips against her almost desperately, their legs intertwined in the small space of the bunk. Jyn heavily breathed through her nose, her brain completely blank. Red stars, white stars, golden daze. She contracted around him, reaching back with one hand to grip his arm. A high-pitch moan rasped in her throat, still marvelling at the new sensation of someone other than herself giving her an orgasm (again).

A short minute later, he came inside of her, collapsing in a spiral of bliss and exertion. He rested over her, his face nuzzling in the crook of her neck, his violent breathing looking for relief in her perfume. Jyn brushed a hand over his face, unmoving, holding him close. They stayed silent for a long while, neither of them daring to break the neutral ground of their lovemaking.

Then, they had to part again.

Jyn found herself lying next to him, looking away, lost in the chaotic maelstrom of the Maw Cluster to conceal her own feelings. With a defiant stubbornness, she remembered why she couldn’t let herself grow accustomed to the lies of her heart—why she needed to smolder the embers before she could form an understanding of the foreign words he spoke to her. She _had_ to do it, close the door and run away before it turned into a wildfire she wouldn’t be able to control anymore.

As if he already knew what she was about to say, Sward stayed perfectly still by her side, attentive to her reactions. He looked at her with that same keen expression she had come to hate as well because it made her feel more naked than when he put his hands on her.

“It’s the last time,” Jyn said. “I can’t do this anymore.” And she hoped for her voice to be steady.

She expected him to ask questions, to be resentful, angry maybe _—_ in the face of rejection. She hardly knew the man, she couldn’t possibly predict his reaction. She was still surprised to find that his reaction was better described as a lack of it.

Sward remained impassive, didn’t even breathe louder into the returned silence of his cabin. He didn’t flinch or put distance between them. He kept on tracing the curve of her waist with a reassuring gesture, pressed against her side, the heat of his body soothing her physical exhaustion. His gentle touch felt familiar.

It felt like an invitation to trust, like they could have fit even closer if they had tried. It made her sick with regrets and sorrow. It reminded Jyn why she desperately needed to end this, whatever _this_ was.

“Alright,” he simply said. And there was no subtone to color his voice, no conditions, no reproaches. Just… a statement of fact. Pragmatic and clinical.

“Alright,” Jyn repeated, and this time, her quivering voice betrayed her.

He caught it _—_ as if he already knew her better than anyone in her life. He slid his hand over her stomach and rested there for comfort, gently stroking her sweaty skin with his scarred palm. Jyn hated how he would make her feel protected just by doing so. She hated that she had never known how much she longed for that feeling before he gave it to her.

It was a lie _—_ but it felt like a good one, the kind of lies people would live among like blind fools.

“Do you want to stay for a while?”

She turned her head to look at him, undecided. Why would she stay any longer? Why would he _want_ her to? His warm gaze appeared unreadable anew; he would have made a brilliant spy. Jyn frowned and welcomed the fierce touch of frustration to distance herself from what might lie beneath, out of reach. Anger was better than a deceitful reverie. Even so, her body had instinctively pressed closer to him in protest at her thoughts.

“Aren’t you going to ask why?”

She wasn’t sure what she hoped to achieve with this.

He didn't raise his voice, didn't harden his features despite her aggressive tone. He gave her the impression that nothing she could have said or done would have shaken him. He was a man who had seen it all, or maybe he really was that emotionless. It felt odd. The sharp contrast between his placid persona and the passion of his touch, just moments ago, wouldn't reconcile in Jyn's mind. As if the person touching her wasn't the same one speaking to her. If it served nothing but an act, he really was the best actor in the whole Galaxy—only she couldn't tell if he faked the gentleness or the detachment. It scared her to no end.

“Do you want me to ask?” Sward casually answered.

His warm fingers still on her stomach like an echo of their embrace. Jyn almost felt a burn under his palm. She swallowed with great difficulty, her mouth dry and her chest heavy with pain. “No… I suppose not.”

She was distressed and wasn't as good as him at staying expressionless. Jyn looked away, fixing the monochrome wall in front of her because it was easier than to look into his eyes and see _nothing_ at all. Did he dream of horrors and frozen corpses at night, too, or did he sleep peacefully? Could he pry her shameful secrets from her brain and judge her for it?

If she had to confess to another living soul, maybe it would have made it easier to bear the agonizing weight of remorse. But it would have been a death sentence to condemn the Empire and Jyn was too much of a coward to meet her end so soon. So many things she had wanted to do… Now, she wasn't sure of anything anymore.

“What made you join?” Jyn asked.

She expected a snarky reply or a dangerous warning. She was left confounded.

“Whatever I could tell you, you won’t find any meaning in it, Jyn.” Her name had a different taste on his lips. She had grown accustomed to his accent to the point of fondness. “This is something you have to figure out for yourself.”

She should have. But somehow, she couldn't stop holding him like a lifeline, like a safe place, like a person she trusted.

“Sometimes, I wish…”

She bit her lip, hard. She couldn’t bring herself to say the words. It was too dangerous, even to him _—_ even when she might have been searching for him before she knew he existed. She couldn't trust, couldn't allow the closeness and the warmth and the vulnerability. No matter how hard she wished for it, she didn't have any future with Jeron Sward and they had dragged this pointless masquerade on long enough. It was hurtful _enough._

Now, it was breaking her heart like shards of glass, already tainted with innocent blood.

Jyn made sure she could control her voice before she spoke again. “We’re right where we ought to be,” she said and tried to believe it with all of her resilience.

A breathless pause. The feel of his hand on her face, brushing away a strand of hair sticking to her temple.

“We are, Lieutenant Erso.”

So this was it then. No more _Jyn._

She looked at him under the cold light of astral storms. She could have seen a million stars reflecting in the deep of his eyes, holding their secrets so far away from her reach. She knew she wasn’t playing in the same category as him. He was important; he had a _purpose_ here. He had a cause to live for, something to fight and to die for.

All the things Jyn had already lost.

And yet, when she looked into his intense brown eyes, she couldn’t shake the insane feeling that maybe if she stayed a bit longer, if she looked a bit closer… she would have discovered them to be so alike. She would have fitted into his world of shadows, she would have stood by his side no matter the cost, stranded in the crossfire for him. She would have seen the same dying stars and held him strong, against all odds, when all the chances would have been spent in the face of war.

“I will remember you,” Jyn said in a bare murmur, heartbroken.

Sward leaned close to her face, kissed her lips with great care—like an ally, like a friend, like a lover. _Partner_. His breath lingered on her face one last time, the feel of his stubble against her cheek and the musky scent of his skin after sex to plague her memories. He smiled at her then, with sad eyes full of unspoken reasons and the corners of his mouth stretched upward. It made him look more handsome than she had known.

“I will remember you,” he said, “the girl with the stardust eyes… One day, you'll stop wishing and you'll start doing something about it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Do you hate me yet? ❤️ I'̶m̶ ̶d̶y̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶w̶r̶i̶t̶e̶ ̶m̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶s̶e̶t̶u̶p̶. (update: I'm writing a longer story for this, so it'll take some time but don't lose hope it's coming.)
> 
> Opening lyrics are from [Starset - Perfect Machine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keMBtyjYUPQ) (and it's a MOOD for the whole story, I highly recommend giving it a listen and have your feelings hurt a little more).
> 
> Here's a little memo of useful terms (I'll update as we go) :)
> 
>  **Ace:** derived from AC, the unofficial designation of the Air Wing Commander. The Ace is the senior pilot aboard a starship, responsible for Air Wing operations and personnel, commanding squadrons. (The Ace on the Basilisk is Wing Commander Razana Frye, Starfighter Corps.)  
>  **CIC:** Combat Information Center  
>  **CO:** Commanding Officer. (The CO on the Basilisk is Commodore Mullinore, with the working title of "Captain" as he commands a starship.)  
>  **ISD:** Imperial Star Destroyer (ex: the ISD Basilisk)  
>  **Master-at-Arms:** non-commissioned officers responsible for internal security aboard starships. (Cassian has infiltrated this branch of the Imperial Navy as a Commander.)  
>  **NCO:** Non-commissioned officer, aka an officer who has not earned a commission. Non-commissioned officers usually obtain their position of authority by promotion through the enlisted ranks. In contrast, commissioned officers usually enter directly from a military academy (as Jyn did after graduating from the Royal Imperial Academy).  
>  **OOD:** Officer of the Deck (also called the Senior Officer of the Watch); monitors the CIC's operation in the absence of the ship's commanding officer. Usually, it's the XO but any senior officer can fill in.  
>  **XO:** Executive Officer (second in command aboard a starship and responsible for administrative duties and the detailed management of affairs, giving the commanding officer time to deal with broader issues.)
> 
> Military structures are very squishy in SW, so most of it isn't canon but I try to be realistic while filling in the blanks. 😄


	2. Tactical Lovers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cassian's mind is a mess.
> 
> Update 19/02/21: this chapter has been beta by @miaouerie, thanks a lot! <3

**02\. Tactical Lovers**

_**D-121** _

On official mission orders, one could find general guidelines for undercover operations.

a) Agents must avoid drinking alcohol. In such situations and whenever possible, agents will consume non-alcoholic beverages. If the need arises, an agent may drink alcohol but should refrain from drinking in excess. (A no-brainer.) b) At no time will an agent consume illicit or dangerous substances as a part of the undercover role. If a situation arises where the undercover agent is forced to use such substances, they should refuse. If the suspect persists, the agent(s) will extract themselves from the situation and terminate contact. (Again, a perfectly logical take… In theory, at least.) Finally, c) an undercover agent will not engage in sexual contact.

Cassian had pondered on the absence of context for this last one; no countermeasure, no elaboration. As if whoever had drafted those absurd protocols couldn’t bear to extend on the implications of such acts. As if no one wanted to touch that can of worms from the other side of the mirror, safe and sound in their morality and virtue.

Cassian didn’t have that luxury—never had. Cassian Andor, twenty-five standard, Rebel Alliance Intelligence, had been operating undercover in the Imperial Navy for two hundred seventy-three days. That put it at two hundred days more than anymore else in the Alliance. And if Cassian had managed to preserve his cover for so long, it certainly wasn’t for standing his moral grounds. _Any means necessary_ , his CO had said—which truly meant… _any_ means. Roger that.

So, during those two hundred and seventy-three days, Cassian drank with the starfighter pilots of the _Basilisk_ on more than one occasion. He deemed it the most effective angle of attack when trying to establish a relationship with the flight personnel. The NCOs of the deck crew were also good candidates. A lot of stories were tossed around after missions and booze helped to make them universal. It also gave Cassian a preliminary profile of the people surrounding him. For example: Nath Tensent, Vortex Squadron Leader, was a heavy drinker and a harsh talker. On the other extreme: Del Meeko, Chief Engineer and commonly referred to as “Chief” almost never touched a bottle and generally kept quiet.

Falling in the middle of the spectrum: Air Wing Commander Razana Frye.

Frye had a habit of showing up to clink cups with her pilots, to be seen and be heard, but never lingered long. She performed the act of comradeship almost as expertly as Cassian, yet perhaps more earnestly.

It made it more difficult to approach her without setting her sensors off. Some breeds of liars could smell each other off from klicks away. Luckily, Cassian’s motivations gave him the upper hand in the matter. Hence… c) sexual contact.

Of course, it hadn’t been his first try. Not onboard ( _abort thought, abort_ ). Not ever. His current persona, Jeron Sward ( _ah, who came up with this one?_ ), fit the criteria and made it _enforcement of undercover identity._ Everything he could do to transform Sward into a credible person, with flaws and desires of his own.

Gambling had been one of his favorite methods, less demanding, more fun, but could hardly be suitable on a Star Destroyer. Promiscuity it was, then.

Cassian wouldn’t martyr himself. Frye was an attractive woman, maybe not to his tastes ( _irrelevant; a man that doesn’t exist doesn’t have tastes)_ , but certainly to Sward’s. She had a brilliant mind, too. So much that she outsmarted (and outranked) Sward by a long shot, even though she never tried to give the man that impression. She only asserted dominance in a cockpit, never on deck.

She didn’t need to; respect flew her way at unanimity. Cassian, although smarter than Sward, wondered on occasion if this wasn’t too much of a close-call for the sake of his mission. For now, he decided that the risk was worth it.

He _needed_ a breakthrough.

Cassian lay flat on Razana Frye’s bunk. She liked to be on top. Fine by him. It didn’t do much for him but it made him last longer—which she probably enjoyed. He didn’t care beyond those parameters: please the mark to get an insight. He wouldn’t be that much of an asshole to pretend that the experience was entirely _excruciating._ Sward could enjoy some of it. Cassian, not so much. The thin line between dissociation and fragmentation would drive any medic crazy. But no one had time to worry about that while people died.

In the privacy of her statecabin, Frye and Sward fucked like they had done a few times already. They knew the drill by now. Her palms on his shoulders, her hips in his hands; hard, fast, relief from the stress of their jobs, a rushed thrill of endorphins. Nothing less, nothing more. She never talked during sex and, frankly, he liked it better that way. Although Cassian knew what to say and how to say it, using words had always been harder than using bodies in such instances. A degree of… fakeness that he was reluctant to cross, still.

_Ridiculous._

Bottom line: he didn’t need to. Didn’t need to do much, either. Frye knew what she liked and how to get it. She might have been using him as much as he was using her—which was another lucky predicament in Cassian’s situation. It made it more bearable, knowing that they both got something out of this transaction. His motives, of course, were more damming and would remain inexcusable. Beyond the simple impulse of sexual gratification. But if he had nothing else to cling to, Cassian wouldn’t mind trying. He didn’t often have that last rope, where others had been… _vulnerable, honest, loving… the stare of her gold-flaking eyes through his soul—_

Frye cried out and grabbed his wrists, breath coming out in short pants to match his own. She stopped moving as her body unraveled around him, pulsing where they connected. She might have enjoyed her orgasm seeing how she closed her eyes for a moment, shifting the weight of her body to sit back on his hips. When she opened them again to look at him, she ran her fingers along his chest, but Cassian couldn’t bother to enjoy the gentle caress.

Half his brain capacity stayed focused on immediate inputs: his cock still hard and invited into someone else’s body. The other half analyzed. Most of the time, Frye’s microexpressions weren’t encrypted. She had no tastes for subtleties and deception: she meant her words and her actions. She didn’t waste energy on pleasing people. And if she’d offended some of them, she considered it their problem, not hers. Imps or Rebels, the majority of starfighter pilots Cassian had met fit that same profile. It wasn’t a surprise, then, when she pulled back with a half-smile.

“That was nice,” she said, brushing back her blonde hair. “Gotta run; pre-flight meeting in five. You can finish yourself, right?”

Cassian snorted, folding one arm behind his head. “Sure.”

“Okay, let’s do that again sometime.” Frye traced his jawline with a thumb before hopping out of bed. She put her clothes back on with trained efficiency (too many brisk wake-up calls would condition you to be able to dress-up in the complete darkness with no brain-power running), combed her short hair into a low ponytail, and grabbed her gear. Shiny black reinforced helmet (hers had a red stripe going down in the middle: elite pilot) on black jumpsuit. The sounds of her boots hit the deck while Cassian, for his part, still hadn’t moved. She nodded at him one last time and left without another word. Clean, easy, effective. A done deal.

Cassian waited for good measure. He thought about taking on her offer to ‘finish himself’. The rational part of his brain approved the idea, if only out of practicality.

Privacy had been nice (and put to good use) while it lasted, but the empty bunk on his own cabin had been occupied since the last personnel boarding a few weeks back. No matter the context, Cassian hardly felt in the mood to jerk off with another person perched centimeters above him. In her quality of Air Wing Commander, Frye was probably one of the only senior officers enjoying her own statecabin (CO and XO excluded). And she was charitable enough to share it with him.

So, yes, he should’ve used the opportunity to reset his body.

Instead, Cassian sat up, reaching for his uniform on the ground, and started to mindlessly dress himself . By the time he was done, straightening the heavy fabric on his chest, his arousal was long gone (nothing like putting on an Imperial uniform to turn him off). That discomfort would come back to bite him in the ass later on, something he had grown used to. Now wasn’t the time to think about it; his mind refocused on the high stakes of the mission.

He didn’t invite himself to Frye’s company for the sake of it.

If she was an ace pilot, she was nevertheless a messy individual. Holofiles and flight reports crammed her working desk, monopolizing all of Cassian’s attention as he combed through it with a racing mind. Scoping for bits and pieces. Cross-referencing names and dates in search of the needed intel. Making sure to render the desk identical to the state he had found it.

No such thing as _luck_ this time. It left him bitter, made it harder to justify sleeping with the mark when he wasn’t making any progress.

He used to be better. Re: why they sent him to do a job that no one thought possible, a lost gamble. But Cassian Andor could succeed, they had decided (somewhere in a room where no one had ever had to fuck another as if they meant it, while staying ready to reach for a weapon at any given time). The question remained open: could he really?

Leaving Frye’s quarters, Cassian walked back to his own berthing, below the hangar deck. His plan included hitting the showers room and plugging in a few hours’ sleep before his next shift. Sward’s job was straightforward but still required some attention. Cassian had the distinct impression that the Master-at-Arms didn’t like Sward (or maybe simply didn’t like _anyone_ ), and didn’t want to give the old man any reason to toss him in the brig.

Regrettably, the shorter path between point aurek and besh walked him right by that spot where—

_—Are you okay?_

She wasn’t here today, cramped between two dogged hatches. Small mercy.

As a matter of fact, he had barely seen her during the last two standard-months. Access to CIC was restricted, off-limits for Jeron Sward. She slept below the flight deck. With roughly nine thousand officers on board, and triple the amount of enlisted, they wouldn’t cross paths except maybe in a mess hall or training room. They wouldn’t acknowledge each other, acting as if he didn’t know the sweet smell of her skin below her ear, down her chest, between her thighs—

_—I can’t do this anymore._

The mere fact that he had found her that time, with such impeccable timing and emotional assertion had been almost insultingly perfect.

Naturally, Cassian had done what he did best: assert, mark, exploit. _Senior Lieutenant Jyn Erso._ Daughter of Galen Erso, a priority surveillance target. A chance in a million. He couldn’t let it go to waste. For a while, he even hoped that she could be the missing piece in his mission—but it became quite clear that Erso had no involvement in any of it. She was scared, terrified, barely holding on.

He considered flipping her. Multiple times.

With a bit more time, he might have been successful. But she was too unstable, still—unpredictable, volatile. The risks outweighed the rewards: simple cost-benefits analysis. Cassian made up his mind and dropped the idea. Why did he keep seeing her, then? If she couldn’t be used and couldn’t be recruited, she had no value to him. She was a _waste_ of his time. But— _kriffing’fucking’black’skies_ —the way she looked at him…

A shameful truth: Cassian simply liked how she made him feel. That she made him feel, at all.

He hadn’t tried to come up with an explanation for it ( _why her, what’s different, why now_ ) but he couldn’t deny himself that much. Maybe because he found her attractive, in a way _Cassian_ did. Maybe because something in her felt familiar, though he couldn’t possibly name it. Maybe because of the way she undressed him… like an act of revenge. She wasn’t trying to fuck his rank. She wanted the man under the uniform and—after having spent so many days undercover—her insistence in finding him had been the only thing to remind Cassian that such a man, indeed, existed. She simply didn’t know how deep she had to dig to find him. _Would you like him if you did?_

The timing had been providential on many fronts. Cassian didn’t like to admit it to himself but if he hadn’t walked on a drunk little officer that night, he might have permanently forgotten where to draw the line. Living among these people, laughing with them, drinking with them—it wasn’t any different than any other factions he had known. Different uniforms, different sides of the war.

Like in any sample of the population, some people were better than others. But here at the bottom of the hierarchy, in the mundanity of simple soldiers, few individuals were truly aware of the nature of the Empire. Horrific decisions were drafted in secret and carried out with blanket justifications, fragmented. Most of them didn’t even have an inkling of the real targets.

Del Meeko fixed his starships, Razana Frye made sure to get her pilots home after each run, but Jyn Erso… Jyn Erso was _terrified_ by her actions. She saw the _Basilisk_ ’s undiscerned ferocity, up there in CIC. She knew _who_ they were shooting at. It was she who _gave_ the clearance.

Hard to pretend you’re protecting the Galaxy from terrorists when you pulverized unarmed targets.

The plea in her eyes made Cassian realize how far he had slipped.

This unshared secret of theirs touched something in Cassian, a part of his heart mistreated and abused. He used her to feed the sheepish illusion that he could still find solace somewhere. ‘Somewhere’ happened to be in her arms for however long she indulged him. But the core fact that he had manipulated her, accepted her trust, _initiated_ her to sex on the basis of lies; all of that made sure to remind him why he could so easily step in the boots of any Imperial scumbag.

Going as far back as he could remember to his days with the CIS, Cassian had never been the hero of his own story. No one working Intel could. That wasn’t the job.

Someone needed to do it, regardless.

Cassian went straight to the showers room. Mid-shift. Barely anyone in sight. The _Basilisk_ offered the luxury of individual stalls, if only separated by hydrophobic white curtains. Sonics were reserved to Command; the rest of them operated with (not-so-warm) water. Even relying on a power-plant so large that it required half the ship surface, domestic comfort wasn't the top priority.

Cassian stepped under the showerhead, naked again. The first drops of water over his sweaty skin made him shiver unpleasantly. Soon, the sensation disappeared from his mind, entirely focused on erasing the memory of Frye. Soap coated his derm; he scrubbed until it hurt. His face fell forward, shoulders relaxing, wet hair sticking to his forehead. Cassian closed his eyes and took a deep breath, propping himself upright with one hand on the durasteel wall. _Breathe in, breathe out_.

He tried to. He couldn’t let it slip away… this wicked fantasy of her, with him.

_If you trust me. If you find me. If you want me. Say you do._

When he showered, Cassian wouldn’t expose his back to the curtain, purposely facing the other way around. If someone decided to jump him (no telling as to when or how he could be discovered, only the certitude of constant danger pressing around his throat, waiting for that noose to tighten up), his reactivity would impact his chances of survival.

On very rare occasions, Cassian would choose to face the wall.

His free hand brushed his stomach lazily, coming down between his thighs. He palmed his placid self with a strong grip, trying to remember how she did it. A rush of heat traveled to his stomach just thinking about her, causing his lower abdomen to flex in anticipation. His whole body reacted as if a switch had been flipped, his cock swelling and hardening into his hand on command. The mapping of his nerves screamed up under his skin, still tangled from frustration, nearing the uncomfortable zone. But Cassian had no intention to stop this time. He shut his eyelids with more intent, jaws tight, blinding himself to the real world. Lost in the vacuum of his mind, the only place where he knew he could have her the way he wanted to. That sweet poisonous lie.

Jyn Erso kissed him and bit his lower lip, her small, electric body pressed to him. She stood on her toes to reach him, hands gripping his hips for balance. Cassian bent to return her kiss, circled an arm around her waist, and caged her between him and the shower wall. She moaned a low sound of content into his mouth, kissing harder, leaving marks on him. His hands ran down her body to worship and explore the burning skin under his palms. He found the curves of her strong back, of her firm ass. He squeezed her flesh, pressing her hips to him like a magnet, the friction of her soft body to relieve his erection. The hint of heat in the space between her thighs, slick and eager for pleasure, made him hard past the point of enjoyment. He wanted nothing more than to be inside her.

He needed her to get respite from the pain and the self-loathing and the loneliness. His lips claiming her mouth, her jaw, her neck. Feeling the pulse of her heart under his tongue, the ghost of her unsteady breathing where her chest heaved, the echoes of her voice. Cassian made her turn around, sealing his torso against her back, never breaking his hold on her. That vulnerable trust to expose her blindspot to him… no way to anticipate or to defend… but still taking pleasure in it. Something he wasn’t capable of. It made his stomach turn from need every time.

She pushed back against his own gravity center, her palms flat on the shower wall for support as he curled his fingers around her hips. Arousal spiked up and down his spine, overwriting every sense, making it difficult to silence his vocal cords—but so intently focused on the initial response whenever he entered her.

(The feel of his closed fist, slowly coming past the head of his cock.)

She moaned again. He kissed the back of her neck, inhaling her sweet perfume like oxygen. She turned her head to the side, whispering: “ _Cassian_.”

(His mind faltered, the image painfully shattering. Jyn Erso disappeared; his eyes opened to the steel panel. Cassian closed them again, barely breathing, all muscles cramped, his grip hard and unforgiving around his length. But he couldn’t stop now. He needed to see her, desperate to live in his fantasy to cope with the suffering of his guilty mind. _Don’t go. Just a bit more. Let me have you._ )

He planted his hand over her stomach, fingers spread, pulling her close to him. He stroked her wet skin, following a path to her core, and pressed his fingertips over a hard point. She whimpered and said his name again. This time, he didn’t try to fight it. This could be real, he decided, if only for now. Cassian moved faster inside her, each thrust slamming their bodies together in perfect unison. Her thighs trembled against him. Where his hand held her: fluid motion, feeling her blood pulsing through her entire body. The pressure of her walls around him like a hot wire ready to snap. If he could hear her scream when she came… and the sound of her voice when she said: “ _Cassian, it feels so good—_ ”

( _Yes. Words. I want to hear them. Tell me._ )

Cassian lost himself in his own urges, his hips jerking up… into her… where he still held her, panting on her neck, her back arched to him, the weight of her body wrapped in his arms… so tightly… until he couldn’t hold back anymore and came with an uncontrollable tremor. “ _—Jyn_.”

Unsure for a moment if the name had escaped his lips or not.

Just as abruptly as he had conjured her, Jyn Erso disappeared. Cassian opened his eyes, almost disoriented by his surroundings. The incriminating reactions went no further; his real breathing was barely an echo to the shameful things he had imagined himself doing. He unwrapped his fingers, let the water rinse his body clean and wash away all evidence. Caught into the collapsing storm of those afterglows, Cassian slipped under the wave of revulsion.

The fact that he could so freely use her image to get off was its own kind of perversion. But the fact that he _needed_ to think about her to get off was… devastating, alarming, pathological. How could he allow himself those kinds of fantasies when he had done so much wrong to her already? She had been smart to cut it short. He would’ve kept taking from her like the selfish asshole he had learned himself to be.

The water felt cold, now, regardless of its temperature.

Cassian turned it off, listening to the sound of an adjacent shower. Droplets of water traveled the scarred lines of his body to the ground, gathering around his feet. His wet hair prickled the nape of his neck. A chilling sensation ran through him at the loss of warmth, at the deprivation of… everything he had just embraced for a short moment in time. Now even harder to face the tasteless reality than it had been before—yet Cassian couldn’t find the self-discipline to stop himself. Another alarm sounding at the back of his brain. _Whatever. Some things can’t be fixed. Maybe I can’t, either._

From the few certitudes he had: he could never hope for Jyn Erso to call his name, and even if she did… it would never be to tell him those things he wanted to hear from her. There would never be a scenario in which Cassian obtained that happy ending, became the hero of his own story. Trust couldn’t be mended that far. Too late, now. He had taken too much, had lied too deeply. He didn’t have a reason to _entertain_ that thought.

…but he kept the taste of her name on his lips, if only for shower stalls and empty nights.

 _Flip her and keep her,_ the most disastrous part of his mind screamed. It was tempting, for a while, to listen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, you remember her? That's right, an update! I'm not gonna lie, I'm very self-conscious about the quality of this follow-up but my heart was so full of love after so many of you requested it that I proceeded against caution. Please, give me some validation I'm an anxious mess! 🙏
> 
> Anyhow, I'm trying something different with Cassian and going somewhere I've always wanted to go. I hope you'll like him, he's very human and maybe not what you expected. I'm curious to know! I wanted to make sure to balance the first chapter from Jyn's POV (which... I'm not still completely sure if I was tripping when I wrote it), and I'll probably keep alternating their POVs. This story is not meant to be super long, but probably *intense*. 
> 
> Leave me a feedback, please, please ❤️ Thanks for encouraging me on expanding!


	3. Inertial Velocity (Part I)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jyn Erso is not in love, anyway. She's not, alright?

**03\. Inertial Velocity (Part I)**

**_D-67_ **

Jyn would like to pride herself on thinking that having sex didn’t make her a different person. Maybe for the fact that no one ever gave her ‘the’ talk, she never viewed it as a rite of passage or a life-changing parameter, nor something she needed to do to be a grown-up. She was a woman way before she let someone touched her. She didn’t give anything of herself away by accepting to share pleasure with another person.

Those convictions hadn’t changed. But Jyn had discovered different perspectives, whether she liked to admit it or not. For a starter, people didn’t give a damn about the prohibition of fraternization. She always knew it to be true, to some degree, but only now did she realize how unbothered everyone else had been acting. Where to have sex on a Star Destroyer, you’d ask? A simple answer: anywhere you could. On a starship this size (her training manuals referenced a length of 1600 meters), possibilities didn’t lack. Many compartments and spaces, nooks and crannies going unmanned almost constantly. Navy personnel had a reputation for being creative. The only rule in vigor: to not get caught.

Jyn wouldn’t have bothered thinking about it before but she now wondered if she was the type to get fucked against a fanroom wall. She had no desire to try, most of the time. _Most of the time_ was the real problem here. That slice of _other times_ where she _did_ want to get fucked against a wall, or anywhere else for that matter, was unprecedented—and the worst part of it: she always imagined it to be with the same man.

She tried to convince herself it was solely due to the fact that he was, indeed, the only man she had sex with. So, naturally, with no other data in stock, her brain would fill the blanks for her. If she started to seek promiscuity with others, she would stop thinking so damn much of that person she tried so hard not to think about. Solid theory.

_Yes— No._

She didn’t want others. It complicated the equation.

Jyn had enough struggles to deal with. She couldn’t afford to add sexual frustration on top of everything else. But it had, during the last four-standard months, regrettably built up to that point where she started to shamefully regret her decision, learning the hard way that touching herself was no longer enough. What the hell did he even do to her? Jyn wished she had a friend to confide in, a person she could trust to talk it out and make sense of her traitorous mind—but the sheer idea of telling someone she had been fucking Commander Sward gave her a cold sweat. _Never in a million years_ , she promised herself.

Jyn tugged at the collar of her dark uniform, trying to breathe like a normal person. She made a conscious effort to straighten her posture, chest up, shoulders back, wearing an invisible armor to stop everyone else to see right through her fears. Listening to the clapping of her polished boots on the deck, she felt trapped in the belly of a beast made of durasteel and hyperdrives. Each step she took, walking down the _Basilisk_ ’s busy walkways, vibrated through her bones like the tension of a vibroblade. Paranoïa wanted to feed her that every murmur, every sideglance glossing over her were the product of her actions. Were they discussing her reckless conduct? Had Sward reported what they’d done to his friends? Was she another notch in his bedpost?

Jyn wasn’t delusional enough to think that she had it _special_ in any sort of way, that he hadn’t done this with others. At times, she dared to think that they had shared something… real—for a lack of a better term. But he hadn’t fallen in love with her. He wasn’t the type of man to let himself go soft like that; she had seen it in his eyes the first time. She wouldn’t have been surprised if he had a spouse dutifully waiting for him to complete his rotation and come back home. He never hinted at anyone. Jyn wondered where ‘home’ might have been.

_Where is your home, Erso?_

Lost in the vague outer space, floating somewhere between everlasting black holes.

It had been years since she had seen her father in the flesh, back when she was a sixteen-year-old cadet being dropped off at the Royal Imperial Academy. He didn’t attend her graduation, couldn’t travel to Coruscant because of some tight schedules. Sometimes, Jyn had the impression that he had been taken hostage by his precious work. Or that he’d found another child in it—a well-behaved, less disappointing one… He made sure to send her a nice present and a holocall, instead. _Almost the same_ , she had persuaded herself. _You’re a big girl, suck it up, it doesn’t matter anymore._ It became easier with every year, maybe by the motion of repetition, erasing the distant memory of a ‘family’. Truth was: that sacred and fragile thing had died with Lyra Erso and nothing had been the same ever since.

Jyn didn’t like to pretend. It was easier not to. She was alone and would always be. Did everybody else feel like she did, too? She imagined it held a certain truth. No matter the strings they tried to attach to people, in the end, they would all die alone. Little Jyn might have been frightened by that idea, fearing the abyssal darkness of the night. Lieutenant Erso had learned to find another type of peace in the vast, silent emptiness of the Galaxy.

Tearing her eyes away from a side viewport opening up on the angry ionized streams attracted by the cluster, Jyn scanned her ID on a security panel. A little _bip_ of approval cleared her to enter the CIC. On each side of the principal door, two Naval Troopers watched her every movement with offensive vigilance. She didn’t like those guys. No one did. Even the Stormtroopers Marines stationed on board made for a better company than those guys. Keeping her thoughts religiously to herself, Jyn walked into the command center, ready to begin her nocturnal shift. She expected to be greeted by a simple nod of acknowledgment as she approached her station. Today, the navigating officer she was meant to replace ( _Endicott. Great._ ) kept his attention focused on his monitors, a harsh tension almost palpable in the air.

Jyn stopped behind the man’s shoulder, waiting to catch an input without disturbing the action. Concise orders passed through the CIC, and although no one shouted, the unusual agitation hinted at something concerning. From her pit of action, Jyn heard the nearby com-scan officer probing: “Holo-7-9, repeat.”

The distant voice came up again, half chopped up. Something appeared to distort the liaison, a fried circuit or a piece of damaged equipment. “ _—ambushed by an un— left on— request emer— damaged the navicom—_ ”

“Sir, I think Holo-7-9 is declaring an emergency.”

“You _think_ or you _know_?” asked the Officer of the Deck. Captain Mullinore wasn’t present at the moment, which probably saved the tech from an even less friendly inquiry. Approximation wasn’t tolerated inside the CIC.

“Unclear. Their comms are jammed, I think—”

“What’s the last assignment for Holo-7-9?” the OOD cut with a harsh voice.

“A transport flight from Kessel, Sir. They were set to dock one hour ago but reported a delay on the ground. We’ve lost comm for a while due to the Maw.”

“Contact again.”

“Yes, Sir. Basilisk to Holo-7-9, please respond. Do you declare an emergency?”

A long silence stretched around the anxious personnel. Jyn quietly reached for a headset and plugged her entry on the console, trying for another frequency. Next to her, Endicott kept on juggling with a handful of other starships currently deployed on various missions, both in and out the immediate reach of the Star Destroyer.

“Holo-7-9, please state your—”

“ _—sustained heavy damage from an explosive device_ ,” the pilot voice plugged in again with a sharp inhale. “ _Declaring an emergency, navicomp is offline—_ ”

“They’re emerging right by the edge,” Jyn said, spotting a corresponding red dot on a monitor. “About six minutes inbound.”

“Clear them for emergency landing,” the OOD instructed, “and inform the deckcrew, isolate the area. Kessel, you said? Get a squad down there. Have Marines firing at anyone off that transport that doesn’t look Imperial. I don’t have time for a prison hijack.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Holo-7-9,” Endicott picked up from the com-scan officer, “realign with vector 1-5-8 and reduce speed for emergency inbound on bay-6.”

Jyn eyed the line of sensors in front of her, her mind buzzing from heavy background noise. Something spun in her brain faster than she could articulate it. Endicott was following the correct procedure, to a fault. She put a hand over her comlink to address him privately: “No, they’re too close from the cluster. They’ll get ejected if their navicomp can’t compensate the pull.”

A disapproving click of tongue answered her. The man still sitting in her seat looked up one second and gratified her with an irritated look. “I know what I’m doing,” he grunted. “They’re way over the margin error so don’t stress it out. Holo-7-9, reduce speed to—”

“Negative,” Jyn immediately cut out, addressing the pilot directly, “standby for instruction.”

“What’s your doshing problem?” Endicott hissed at her, fisting a hand over the console. “I’ve been doing this job longer than you, Erso. Whatever you think you know—”

 _She didn’t ‘think’ she knew. Idiot_. Ignoring the argument entirely, Jyn bent down and drafted a rough approximation of a new flight trajectory on an empty screen. “Holo, what’s your MGLT?”

“ _60 top._ ”

Jyn pursed her lips, displeased. Shitty maneuverability, especially in such a dangerous environment. Piloting near the Maw wasn’t for the faint of heart. With a damaged navigational system, whoever sat behind the control yoke that day was in for the flight of their life. Hopefully, she could assist. Jyn focused all of her brainpower on solving the problem at hand. “Holo, drop by 9 strats and maintain speed. Flying you on vector 2-2-6.”

“ _Unable. Can’t recalculate—_ ”

“That’s okay,” Jyn said. “I’m doing the work. I’ll guide you. Proceed to vector 2-2-6.”

“ _2-2-6_ ,” the pilot confirmed from afar.

“Are you out of your _fucking_ mind?” Endicott loudly commented, gathering the attention of nearby people. “This is my shift, Erso!”

“Well, technically it’s been mine for over two minutes,” she said without intonation. She kept her eyes on the flight radars, hoping that Endicott wouldn’t be stupid enough to push it. He regrettably did, and she couldn’t say she felt surprised.

Standing up like an ejected neutron, the man decided to take a stand for his wounded ego. “Some of us weren’t commissioned because of our parents, Erso. Get your hands off my charts.” He made sure to raise his voice just enough that no one would miss it, which Jyn labeled as unnecessary rude. But what did she expect from a man willing to put his pride before the lives of an entire crew just to prove her wrong?

“Clearly not because of your competences, either,” she sharply replied. “Get your hands off _my_ charts, Lieutenant.”

The use of rank perfectly registered as the insult Jyn intended it to be. If Endicott was determined to make it a personal matter, she wouldn’t shy away from low blows either. And whether he liked it or not, Jyn was a commissioned officer holding the same rank as him and his supposed superior-years-of-experience. From the expression on his face, the stab might have hurt. She didn’t feel sorry for him. Endicott was a power-seeking moron. And a misogynist, too, apparently.

“I knew you were a bitch from the moment you set foot on—”

“What’s going on here?”

“Captain on deck!” the OOD informed with a slight delay.

Still busy checking her navigational systems to manually correct Holo’s trajectory each time they deviated toward the Maw, Jyn had to throw in a salute at Captain Mullinore. What a timing. It was clear from the serious look on the man’s face that the question hadn’t been for show. Jyn tried to come up with the simplest explanation possible but most of her attention was devoted elsewhere. Meanwhile, Endicott didn’t miss the opportunity to answer—and made sure to throw her under the AT-AT by the same occasion.

“Lieutenant Erso is ignoring protocols on an emergency inbound flight despite my clear instructions, Sir. She thinks she knows better than the entire Imperial Navy, apparently.”

“Is that true, Lieutenant?”

“With due respect,” Jyn groaned, a burn on her neck, “I never claimed that, but I surely know better than Lieutenant Endicott on this one. Now if you don’t mind, I’m a little _busy_ trying to bring our people home.”

She couldn’t bite her tongue fast enough to stop the last few words. A lifeless impersonation of her training instructor voice’s rang in the back of her head: she might have to finish her shift in the brig for telling her CO to (politely) fuck off. Well, too late now. Until someone decided to physically stop her, Jyn decided to focus her attention on something more useful than immediate insubordination.

The tensed silence surrounding her was broken by Mullinore’s stark, passionless voice: “Carry on, Lieutenant.”

⁂

Jyn Erso was a creature of habits. She liked to be in control of her environment, aware of any threat at all times. She didn’t remember with precision when she had started to assimilate _people_ with a casual level of threat, but it predated any distinction she’d come to form between Imperials and Rebels. So, early enough. Life had taught her that anyone who wasn’t her could not be trusted. She stood ready for the next treason.

Jyn entered the crowded mess hall on deck-C, joining the wave of mismatched personnel clocking off from the last nocturnal shift (ship’s standard time). She gathered a tray of rations and sat down among a group of familiar faces, looking to choke down her food quietly. The conversation didn’t really pick up around the table. When a relay operator brought up her altercation with Endicott, Jyn simply shook her head and flashed an apologetic smile as to say: _find your gossip elsewhere_. No one insisted. Maybe they, too, thought that she was a nepotistic bitch. She might have cared a few months back. Nowadays, not so much.

Holo-7-9 had docked on the _Basilisk_ height hours ago. The first reports from deckhands had it that the shuttle was missing half a heat-shield paneling on starboard and had its navicomp completely fried by an EMP blast, not to mention all sorts of damage from subsequent ionization bursts flying so close to the cluster. In short: Holo’s pilot was a hero for crash-landing his piece of junk inside a hangar, the crew still breathing. But it was Jyn who had made that possible. She’d helped saved those people. She’d done something _good_. She had her answer—

…and no one to share it with.

Between the constant exchange of _mornings_ and _good nights_ , Jyn left the table and went to clean up her empty tray. She walked by a group of Stormtroopers—the bone-white helmets neatly aligned at the center of their table suggested they were off-duty—and heard the terms ‘terrorists’ and ‘rebel spy’ threw around a few times. She didn’t stop to listen. She didn’t want to be reminded of the people they were fighting. Not when she could focus on the people to save, instead. She was able to feel it blossoming in her chest: that shy, yet fierce, sense of purpose she had missed all along. She could almost dip her fingers into it and let it flood through her veins, extinguishing the burning emptiness inside her. Jyn felt ecstatic for the first time in forever. It could be enough, she decided.

If she could clunge to this simple hope, it would be enough.

Over the white noise of soft chatter and cutlery sound, Jyn’s brain suddenly picked up the echo of something _different_. She couldn’t help but turn in the direction of his voice like a protocol droid to a cue. There, a few feet away from her, stood Commander Jeron Sward. A rushed wave of heat flushed her cheeks just looking at him. He had his back turned to her, arms folded behind him, and yet she still recognized the sharp lines of his shoulders, the map of his neck. She had dug her nails into that same neck not so long ago, felt the sweat over his back, and his raging breath on her throat when—

Jyn snapped from the critical trajectory her mind had entered, a sting of nervousness in her guts. All this time, she’d been able to avoid him well enough. On the very rare occasions when she couldn’t—like this one—she’d simply pretended they never even had spoken to each other. Two perfect strangers in the compact mass of interchangeable soldiers. She had no reason to act differently today. He wasn’t even aware of her presence, speaking with a pair of starfighter pilots and a tall blonde officer that Jyn almost positively identified as the Air Wing Commander. She could walk behind him and discreetly exit the mess hall. He would not notice her. Or—

She could walk behind him and brush his hand, where his fingers held on the opposite wrist, unnoticed of the others. He would know it was her, somehow. He would excuse himself and follow her, not close enough to be suspicious. She would feel the weight of his stare while she’d walk back to deck-E, turn the airshaft maintenance corridor and—between the waste compacting hydraulics and the gas piping crammed on that level—wait for him in the unsanctified forgotten shadows of the _Basilisk_. To feel his hard body hungrily pressed against her, his lips on her neck, and his hands inside her clothes.

Jyn would fuck him right there and then if he’d ask, however fast he’d like, however reckless and unprofessional a conduct it might have been. And she’d _like_ it… oh, she would. Coming back to that place between space and time where nothing else could find her, the memory of his soft gentle eyes boring into her soul like a fusion of dying stars. The way he filled the void between her atoms more than anything else could, forgetting about duty and war and fear and pride. Only the warmth of his arms when he curled around her and whispered foreign words into her ears like their meaning was too important to be trusted into her consciousness. Jyn wanted all of it again: the simple desire of being alive in a selfish and insignificant scale. Most of all, she wanted to see the golden shine of his dark brown eyes when she’d tell him that she had finally figured it out.

She wanted his approbation, and she surprisingly didn’t hate herself for it.

This shameless fantasy died with the next beating of her heat, already dissolved by ruthless reality. Jyn adjusted the leather belt marking her waistline. She didn’t touch Sward’s hand like the lover she still wanted to be. But while she wouldn’t let herself hope for those beautifully tragic things, she still wanted him to _know._ So, Jyn stopped next to the four of them with a ball of anxiety in her stomach and nodded a salute.

“Commander,” she said—controlling her voice to the best of her abilities. Convincing enough.

If Sward was surprised, she would never know. He lowered his gaze on her, a filler expression on his face, and made a point to search for her insignia. “Lieutenant.”

So close to him, Jyn almost regretted her impulsive decision. No turning back without looking extremely stupid.

“My apologies for interrupting,” she said. “I was wondering if you’d have a minute to spare. I have a quick question about… work environment.”

_Now, who’s looking stupid, Erso? Terrible mistake._

Waiting for a reply of some sort, she searched for it in his eyes more than his words. She couldn’t grasp a single of his thoughts, caged behind an unemotional, distant man that she had forgotten him to be. But this wasn’t her lover anymore—had never been, if she was horrifyingly honest with herself—this was the austere senior officer she had known him to be, walking without ever glancing sideways. Jyn’s little stupid hope collided with a wall of ice in the most brutal way, and she hadn’t been intelligent enough to do it in private.

“I’m not available, Lieutenant,” Sward replied. His tone wasn’t harsh nor insulting. It was the worst it could have been: void of any inflection, dehumanized, desensitize to her entire presence. “If you have an issue to resolve, go see the Master-at-Arms.”

Never before it had taken Jyn so much energy to simply push some words out. She wished she could have walked into a depressurizing chamber—threw herself into the vacuum of deep space, sucked into one of the Maw’s black holes and disappeared. It wouldn’ have felt very different from what she experienced at that moment… the incommensurable dread, the freezing burn in her heart… _The next treason_. “Yes, of course. I was just… That was uncalled for, sorry, Sir.”

She turned around just as her voice started to crack. One step, two steps…

“ _Work environment_?” mocked a feminine voice in her back. “That’s how the kids call it nowadays?”

“Spare me the stupid assumptions,” Sward said to her.

“You want me to believe you two aren’t matching the uniforms?”

Jyn couldn’t vacant perimeter fast enough. She couldn’t _unhear_ it either, her senses acutely trained to listen to every bit of transmissions on every frequency.

“We’re not. Like you said: she’s a kid.”

“I guess she _did_ want legal advice, then.”

“I wouldn’t mind advising her in private,” one of the pilots laughed in turn.

“That’s very low,” someone replied like a shared joke, “even by your standards, Tensent. She’s probably ten years younger than you.”

“Maybe, but TIE’s pilots don’t live long. I have to make the most of it. So if Sward isn’t banking on that attractive ass…”

Jyn didn’t want to hear the rest, she did _not_. She pushed through a group of engineers with a flagrant lack of politeness, almost out of the mess hall, safe and sound. The furious beating of her blood into her eardrums did nothing to cover the last residue of Sward’s voice when he said: “Help yourself. I couldn’t care less.”

Jyn was positive that she had never been in love with Jeron Sward—so she had to wonder, through the tears wetting her eyelashes, why it felt like her heart had been ripped off of her chest with a blazing knife.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, before you all jump at Cassian's throat for being an absolute douche, I humbly request that you wait to read the second part of this chapter... Then you'll be free to pass judgment and curse at him all you want.
> 
> (I may or may not be ripping my chapter titles from Alphabet Squadron and I'm not sorry. Notice me sempai.) 
> 
> A big social distancing hug of gratitude for your comments on the previous chapter (if you like hugs), you guys are the real mvp. ❤️


	4. Inertial Velocity (Part II)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Not for her, not entirely.

**04\. Inertial Velocity (Part II)**

**_D-67_ **

Cassian finished to unbutton his jacket and set it flat on the nearby table, neatly folded to avoid any crease on the grey blend of fabric. Eyes down, he carefully rolled up the sleeves of his thermal undershirt, exposing his bare skin to the freezing temperature of the cell. His derm reacted with a shiver of protestation, trying to battle against the cold. His breath materialized in front of him like the vaporous white clouds curling around Fest’s mountains. He pushed that thought away before it could do any damage.

“Prepare for chemical burn of superficial tissues,” he instructed with a flat, emotionless voice.

Hovering above ground without a sound, the circular torture droid reconfigured its arsenal with a series of mechanical _clicks_ before rotating towards the prisoner. The single red eye of the IT-O shadowed half the Balosar’s face with crimson light, masking away the evidence of fresh blood on the near-Human skin. The unintended illusion couldn’t prevent Cassian from smelling it in the air. Metallic. Iron-based. Distinctive.

He’d grown accustomed to it, not only for the hours he’d spend in a cell like this one but for all the lives he’d witnessed coming to an end—regardless of his involvement in the process.

 _Don’t try to escape it_.

Cassian was involved. Cassian had made the choice long ago—still _had_ the choice of all the others that followed—just not one he could justify. Not to him, not to the mission, not to the unspeakable things he’d already done in the name of a rebellion that couldn’t prevent horrors from happening to innocent people. But who was still innocent in this fight?

The Balosar strapped to the interrogation table had made his own choices and smelled that same sweet, sickening odor of blood before. He’d done unspeakable things, too, when he decided to plant a bomb on the Imperial transport and engaged in a suicide mission. It hadn’t been set to detonate this early; that was a malfunction, or more probably a desperate attempt at taking _some_ people with him the moment he’d been discovered by the shuttle crew. His likely objective would’ve been the _Basilisk_ : waiting to dock on the flight deck and to destroy an entire squadron, or maybe even infiltrate the ranks and take out a critical target. Weaponry. Mechanic. Control and Command. Plenty of choices.

_A blast powerful enough to tear off containment shields and destroy the command bridge, hundred of people killed, her corpse floating in the dark void of space, forever drifting away with that last expression of terror frozen on her face—_

Cassian closed his fist to stop a twitch in his hand. He stepped closer to the prisoner, looking at him without really seeing him. He didn’t know much, but he knew enough. Half-confessions obtained between screaming pleas. Phantoms names. _Partisans_.

Getting closer to the truth would prove too dangerous to waste time on it. No point in trying, either. There was only one way to go from here: a choice that Cassian had made before he knew he would have to make it. The thin grey line to walk… in a world of crimson shadows and abject lies.

The man’s eyes flickered to him in fear the moment he stepped in front of him. Cassian nodded at the IT-O.

“Begin,” he said.

The droid readjusted its altitude to target an exposed area of skin, ready to deliver a dose of corrosive chemicals precisely calibrated to inflict tremendous pain without shortening the prisoner’s survival expectancy. A single blink of its red censor: scanning the target’s vital signs before proceeding. Then…

Cassian moved his bare forearm in front of the Balosar’s chest, catching most of the burn. A spasm of agony ran through his entire arm, to his shoulder, extending to his chest like liquid fire. His heart hammered faster against his ribs. He grunted from pain, trembling on his feet, and caught himself with his other arm against the side of the interrogation table. “What’s fucking gotten into you?” he hissed between his teeth, letting the physical trauma pierced in his voice for added value.

“I do not understand,” the droid sternly answered, its tone identical to every IT-O Interrogation Unit Cassian had ever encountered. “You put yourself at risk.”

“You’ve harmed _me_ ,” Cassian barked, his injured arm pressed against his chest helplessly. “I’m sending you to get a complete CPU diagnosis and you’re not to interact with any organics until I hear back from engineering. That’s an order!”

“Understood, Commander.”

Cassian watched as the droid floated toward the door, throbbing pain on the entire left side of his body. He waited for it to exit and for the reinforced panel to slide shut again before allowing himself to move. He couldn’t be sure of how long that trick would hold up. If someone were to check, the audio recording of that interaction would provide Cassian with an additional safety-net, but every _interference,_ every _discrepancy_ surrounding Jeron Sward slowly chipped at his persona and increased the risks of getting noticed. For now, he could only hope that no one would be looking too intensely in his direction.

Cassian fumbled around with his good hand, reaching for a small object secured in the inside of his boot. Stretching back to his full height, the modified transponder now in his hand caught the attention of the prisoner.

“You…,” he chocked, drooling blood. “Who—”

Cassian unsealed the compartment and flip a little white pill in his palm. He held the man’s gaze, watching as his tired and desperate brain painfully plugged the pieces back together.

“ _Rebel_ ,” the man finally breathed and his blood-shot eyes dilated from the sudden rush of adrenaline. Cassian presented the pill to his lips without a word. Nothing to be said in such circumstances. Any effort would have been a burning insult in the face of a condemned man. “Help me,” the Balosar still pleaded. His antennapalps shivered from fear. A last desperate attempt, against all logic and pragmatism.

Blood ran cold inside Cassian’s veins. The pulsing pain of his burned forearm dissolved from his censors. A dark, suffocating weight closed around his throat, feeling like the air inside the cell had turned to solid ice. “I am helping you,” Cassian said, low and somber.

The prisoner’s reaction wasn’t instinctive nor immediate. Cassian followed it on his face like the transcript of an actual conversation. _There._ The exact moment of surrender, when all hopes crumbled down for the last time. No curse. No fight. Only one way out.

Cassian pushed the suicide pill past the man’s lips and watched him bite down on the affide crystal.

 _Any means necessary_ , Draven repeated in the back of his head.

⁂

“That’s crazy!” Tensent growled. “I’ve always told people to stay away from those sadistic ballsacks. I would’ve put a blaster hole in it, honestly.”

“It’s likely a spatial captors malfunction,” Cassian answered.

“Never too careful,” the man insisted, arms crossed over his chest.

“I hope they gave you a few days of sick-leave,” another pilot from Vortex Squadron said.

“It wasn’t necessary. They patched me up well enough, just a couple hours of bacta treatment.” Cassian rotated his now-healed arm to demonstrate. No residual nerve damages. As good as new, if it wasn’t for the ghostly sensations of remaining pain still plaguing his mind. Something to work on at a later time. His real concern—

“And that prisoner,” Razana Frye said, “I’ve heard he bailed out before you could finish interrogating him.”

Cassian put his arms behind his back, holding his wrist in one hand to monitor his pulse.

Frye was his most present concern. Something about the way she looked at him while she spoke. Cassian knew liars and players and spies and how the best of them managed to win those games of shadows. Frye didn’t care about the prisoner, nor about interrogations, but that dangerous flicker of heat in the center of her eyes was an omen of things to come. He was powerless to stop it. From now on, they would both dance around each other with a poisonous uncertainty—and Cassian’s only advantage was to have made it to her bed before she could start forming any define thoughts on the things she couldn’t see yet.

“Good riddance,” Tensent snorted, “fucking terrorists.”

_Aren’t we all. The violence that we cannot end._

Cassian didn’t give voice to those thoughts: no one could question the Empire. _Treason_. Jeron Sward wasn’t a traitor and diligently nodded his agreement. It started to become harder every time—not knowing which part of him still faked the repulsion, which part of him wanted to take comfort in the illusion of cohesion, which part of him had lost any capacity to _feel_ anything at _all_. On both fronts. Ripped apart by pretending, buried under his fractured self. Not knowing on which side to sleep anymore to tame the pain. No one to hold him through the terrors disguised in those nights without moons.

_How much time till I get myself killed— ?_

Cassian missed the sound of her footsteps until she stopped next to them. His gaze locked onto her with an initial burst of weariness. She’d kept her distances for months. He had trouble coming up with an explanation for that sudden change of behavior. What did she want? What did she know?

“Commander,” she said—and Cassian noticed how much effort she put into the perfunctory tone. Convincing enough for her audience. He had the presence of mind to search for her insignia before answering her. In a starship this size, Sward couldn’t have known every single officer, let alone remembered their ranks.

“Lieutenant,” he said, and almost let her name slip. His grip tightened around his wrist.

He’d almost forgotten the color of her eyes. So close to her, he couldn’t escape the bewitching sight of her gold flake gaze, the vibrant sea green dotted with little dust of light. He’d called it stardust once; Cassian had to pull back from its gravity like a minefield of erupting novae.

“My apologies for interrupting,” she said. “I was wondering if you’d have a minute to spare. I have a quick question about… work environment.”

Was that really the best she could come up with? It made no sense to him. Cassian didn’t want to play that fucking game anymore. Not today. He couldn’t excuse it, couldn’t indulge it. He didn’t _deserve_ it. He felt terrified, like a whisper emerging from a part of himself that didn’t see daylight often, of what could happen if he did. The things he would say to her to make her comply… the things he would do if she didn’t. Cassian felt terror at the idea of losing his grip, of slipping too far, of using her more than he’d already done.

It was easy to have sex with Frye because she’d never looked at him like Jyn Erso looked at him now. A sharp pain stung between his ribs. Unresidual. _Fuck._

_Don’t think about it. Don’t you dare. // Flip her and keep her. You can have her. // You can’t. It’s abuse. You’re a lying piece of shit. She’s Imperial. // She wants it. Just once more. You’ll be gone soon anyway._

“I’m not available, Lieutenant,” Cassian said like a sentence. The fingers of his left hand started to get tingly from the painful pressure he maintained over his wrist—all he could do to contain the physical reactions trying to escape him. “If you have an issue to resolve, go see the Master-at-Arms.”

He wished he hadn’t been skilled enough to read her like a cracked file. To her credit, she managed to give it a good try. “Yes, of course. I was just… That was uncalled for, sorry, Sir.”

She mercifully turned around just when Cassian thought that she was about to lose it.

_Get the fuck away from me. You don’t want any of this. If I told you… every time I need to get off, I keep thinking about fucking you senseless like a degenerate. I want you to be nice to me. I want you to want me. I want you to say my name—but you don’t know which one. This is not what sex is about. I would break you just to make you see my world, stardust girl. And I wouldn’t even regret it because someone has to pay for the crimes of this world._

“Work environment?” Frye mocked. “That’s how the kids call it nowadays?”

“Spare me the stupid assumptions,” Cassian said, too tired to even check his tone.

“You want me to believe you two aren’t matching the uniforms?”

“We’re not. Like you said: she’s a kid.”

His stomach turned upside-down at the words. _She wasn’t such a kid when you decided to weaponize her distress and got her back to your bunk. She wasn’t such a kid when you put your mouth between her thighs. She wasn’t such a kid when she let you co—_

“I guess she _did_ want legal advice, then.”

“I wouldn’t mind advising her in private,” Tensent laughed in turn, and Cassian willed himself to not even think about it. Hardly effective.

“That’s very low,” his teammate replied, “even by your standards, Tensent. She’s probably ten years younger than you.”

“Maybe, but TIE’s pilots don’t live long. I have to make the most of it. So if Sward isn’t banking on that attractive ass…”

What if he said something as obnoxious as ‘don’t ever touch her’, ‘I never said I wasn’t’, ‘she’s too pretty for your stupid face’ and tried to pass it as a joke? They would all laugh, call it a day, and never think about it again. But Frye was here—and she was watching. And somewhere down the line, Cassian drafted all the possible ramifications that would link him back to this exact conversation… and the dangerous implications that it would carry for Lieutenant Jyn Erso. Out of guilt or misery, Cassian decided to cover his tracks—not for her, not entirely, but mainly to abjectly feel better about himself.

“Help yourself. I couldn’t care less.”

He didn’t look above his shoulder. He didn’t possess antennapalps like the man he’d killed before breakfast. He couldn’t know for sure.

He still did. He knew that she had heard him, and from all the terrible lies he’d fed her, this was the most painful to swallow because he hurt _her_.

Cassian fantasized about going after her, about finding a quiet corner to tell her that he _cared_. He fantasized about the way she would respond to that, and the soft vulnerability in her beautiful eyes when she’d forgive him—for everything. He fantasized about kissing her and convincing her that her side wasn’t the _right_ side, that she would do much better fighting for freedom, that she could be so much _more_. He fantasized about telling her his name, and her whispering it in his ear while she lay under him on Dantooine.

But he never went after her. He never got to feel better about himself. And he wasn’t sure, each passing day like a countdown, that he would ever see twin moons setting over Dantooine again. Maybe for the best; Cassian couldn’t imagine coming back from this anymore. He had forgotten _how_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *She gets free therapy, you get free therapy, everyone gets free therapy!* 
> 
> Ok, next chapter: less avoidance, more feelings. Stay tuned! 
> 
> (Oh btw, I've seen a few of you are calling him Joreth and I just wanna say that it's not a mistake of my tired brain. 😂 I just wanted to give him an additional fake ID seeing that this storyline doesn't match the Joreth Sward one. But you can keep reading him as Joreth if you prefer, it's all good with me!)


	5. Situational Awareness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jyn Erso might be in love, after all. Oh, well.

**05\. Situational Awareness**

**_D-33_ **

Jyn ran through the monochrome corridor on deck-C, trying to escape the mocking stares of the people surrounding her. They whispered and pointed at her relentlessly. She couldn’t discern voices, no matter how hard she tried, but she knew that they were talking about her. Someone shoved a hard shoulder in her way. Jyn stumbled on her feet, the artificial gravity of the _Basilisk_ pulling at her like a rogue object entering her orbit. The line of horizon tilted and began to spin. She almost fell to the ground, all landmarks lost. She caught herself on the wall at the last moment, hands on the pipelines.

“Jyn.”

She turned around, short of breath and lightheaded. The endless moving corridor had vanished, and all the people with it. Instead, she stood frozen between two dogged hatches on the lower deck. Jeron Sward materialized in front of her, his stern face half-eaten away by dangerous shadows. His dark eyes focused on her and he took another step in her direction, bringing them so closely together.

“Jyn,” he said again. “Listen to me.”

“No,” she tried to argue but found herself trapped between his tall body and a wall. With nowhere to go, Jyn looked up to meet his serious stare.

“I care. I care about _you._ ”

“You’re a fucking liar,” she sobbed, hitting a fist over his chest. “I don’t believe you!”

“I have to make it right.”

“I don’t want to be with you. Leave me alone!”

Jyn had to wonder—horrified—why she would say such things to him when she wanted the exact opposite. But the words kept coming out without her approval, harsh and insulting. Tears brimmed her eyes while she gaped at him in despair, hoping that he would _stay_ , even if she continuously pushed him away and screamed at him to leave.

Jeron caught her wrists and lowered his face with a menacing tone. “Stop.”

She didn’t. She kept on fighting him, with less efficacy but still rebelling as best as she could. “Leave me the fuck alone!” _No, don’t. Please, don’t._ “Go away! Just go!” _Don’t leave me, please. Everybody always leaves. Please, stay. Say you will. Say I’m good enough._

“Let me make it right,” he breathed into her hair, her hands sealed to his chest. “Jyn.”

Something about the way he said her name… And suddenly he had his arms around her and her chest was about to implode. Jyn stopped fighting. A wave of relief crashed upon her; someone had finally walked over that threshold for her. The warmth of his body made her heart quicken between her ribs. She held him, back, arms around his waist, hoping that nothing would change. She buried her face on the front of his jacket, his hands in her loose hair, gently combing.

“Let me make it right,” Galen Erso said, standing next to her.

Jyn gasped in fear, holding Jeron like a lost child. She didn’t want to face her father, not after all this time. It was too painful, too late; she didn’t know how to pick up the pieces anymore. Tears kept rolling down her cheeks and she shook her head. She tore her gaze away from the aging man and looked back at Jeron instead. His passionless face felt more familiar than the one of her kin. His lips curved upward slightly, the faintest trace of a smile around the corners of his eyes. He cupped her face between his palms and stroke her skin with a soothing motion.

Jyn forgot about her tears and her father and pressed herself against him again, hoping that he would kiss her. Hoping to make it alright. Hoping to find shelter. If he’d stayed, maybe—

He touched his lips to hers in a shameless kiss, stealing the air from her lungs. Jyn’s fingers curled around the fabric of his jacket, desperately holding him down to her. A searing fire erupted in her soul, burning brighter than any star ever charted in the Galaxy. She kissed him back without breathing, parting her lips and dragging her tongue against his. A suppressed moan escaped her dry throat when he mirrored her. Jyn arched her body into the space he gave her. He molded his own into the curves of her, pushing her flat against the wall.

“You’re mine,” he pleaded in her ear, leaving red marks down the column of her throat. “Say it.”

“I’m your—”

He dragged his mouth back to hers and gently kissed her lips. “No, not that.”

Jyn took another trembling breath. She closed her eyes, their foreheads touching, and whispered: “I love you.”

“Yes. You’re my lover, Jyn.”

_I am. I want to be._

Steady hands began to loosen up her clothes, running up and down against her skin with a pleasant burn. She grabbed his shoulders, messed up his hair with uncoordinated gestures. Jeron went back to kissing her neck, his wet lips unlocking panting noises of pleasure from her. Jyn let her head fall back in abandon. She shivered under the touch of his hands, expertly roaming over her craving body, tracing her waistline, her sides, her breasts. Grabbing and stroking. Coming down to slide over her hips, inside her pants and digging his fingers into her ass.

Jyn’s voice cracked over a needy moan. She followed the dynamic of his pull, spreading her legs around him while he dragged her up. They fumbled with each other in a chaotic hurry, caught in a mixture of blazing lust and desperation. It wasn’t as sensual and liberating as it seemed to be in those holos. Jyn felt a dangerous dread within herself—to be caught maybe, she knew their time was limited… but she wanted every second of it, regardless.

Jeron’s breathing felt hot and unsteady against her face. His musky perfume filed her every breath, making it impossible to think about anything else than the ache between her thighs. Jyn wrapped her legs around his hips and the hard leather of his belt dug into her muscles with discomfort. She did nothing about it, only chasing after the friction of him against her burning core. He moved with her, fully hard and straining against his uniform. She gasped his name and let him roll his hips, sending an electrifying jolt of pleasure up and down her spine.

She wanted to have him inside her, to feel his naked skin, the flexing muscles of his shoulders, to dig her nails into his back like she used to. But she couldn’t stop this; she couldn’t wait either, her body moving and responding instinctively. And fuck if she wasn’t going to come just like that.

Even when another layer of her subconscious started to intersect with her emotions, Jyn refused to open up to it. She needed this so badly. She needed to be with him. _Don’t go away._

Her arms spasmed around a ghostly form. Jyn’s heart jumped in her throat, free-falling into an abyss of exploding stars and black holes. She surfaced with a choked gasp, eyes wide open into the faint gray light piercing through the privacy curtain of her bunk. Jyn put a hand over her mouth, praying that no one had heard her, feeling her eyelashes still wet from heavy tears. Her whole body was drenched in sweat, hair sticking to her face and neck. Blood pounded into her ears with each beating of her furious heart, protesting this new, unwelcomed reality. She pressed her thighs together, the coarse blanket trapped between them doing nothing to ease her painful arousal.

She couldn’t go on like this, dreaming about him night after night. Waking up like a sobbing mess. Stroking her fingers where she wanted him to touch her in a pathetic attempt to chase after the last remnants of his memory. Her hands were too small, too soft, too gentle; they weren’t _his_. But it was all she had right now and she was so close already. Jyn bit on her hand to silence her cry of release when she came, eyes painfully shut and the agony of her lonely soul to keep her company.

_It’s not love._

_It’s never been love._

_You can’t be in love with someone that you don’t know._

_You just love the idea of him. You just love the idea of being loved._

⁂

Jyn clutched the datapad to her chest, making her way through the busy flight deck. For all the time she’d spent on the Star Destroyer, she’d rarely ventured down there. The contrast with the CIC was staggering: a constant agitation that, even coordinated and following its own set of rules, buzzed around ships and maintenance equipment with loud noises and heavy chatter. Deckhands worked on the parked ships, pilots walked in and out of the area with helmets under their arms and stories about their last flight to exchange.

Jyn scanned the deck in search of a blonde woman. No such luck, but she advised a pilot with a cocky attitude that looked familiar hanging next to a docked TIE phantom. Trying not to flinch at the memory of the humiliating interaction, Jyn gathered her courage and walked up to the man. Tensent, if she recalled correctly. She knew him to be part of Vortex squadron and, judging by the smug look on his face, he probably thought highly of himself. To be fair, most starfighter pilots did.

She might break that datapad in half if she held it any tighter. With a nervous lump in her throat, Jyn said: “Excuse me, sir.” She didn’t remember his rank, and the man wore his flysuit rolled down around his waist, making it impossible for Jyn to get a clue. Some officers easily took offense when not using their actual rank. She hoped that Tensent wasn’t one of them.

“Look at that, are you lost?” he snickered with a half-smile. “Or were you looking for me?”

Jyn ignored the suggestive layer in that question. She’d be lying if she said that it was the first time she had to do it. It made her extremely uncomfortable at times, especially when she had to evade people above her rank with the persistent fear that it would come back to interfere with her work. But wouldn’t that make her a perfect hypocrite? She couldn’t fuck an Imperial commander and simultaneously wish for everyone else to keep their flirtation non-existent.

At least, Tensent was all smiles and no hands.

“I’m looking for the Ace, actually,” Jyn said. “I was hoping you’d seen her.”

“Am I missing some drama?” the man laughed.

“What?”

After another second or so of silence, Tensent said: “You just missed her. My guess, she’d be in her quarters.” That would have been Jyn’s next destination, regardless. She nodded. “But maybe you should try in a few hours. We just came back from flight rotation… she’d be pretty busy…”

“Yeah, I know you guys must be toasted,” Jyn winced. “I just need to catch her for a minute. Mission order. The XO will be on my back if I don’t get this done.”

Once again, Tensent flashed her an amused grin. She didn’t know the man enough to draw a conclusion, but she wondered if he was laughing _about_ her.

“Good luck, then,” he said and clapped his hand on Jyn’s shoulder. She didn’t think anything of it.

⁂

Jyn stood motionless in the middle of the pathway, her heart beating so fast that she experienced pain in her chest. The longer she would wait, the harder he’d be. She needed to knock on that door. There was no way around this. And no matter how hard she wished she’d never seen Jeron Sward walking into that room moments ago, she couldn’t drop her work and run away like a scared little girl.

Her previous conversation with Tensent saved her the effort of wondering if she was jumping to conclusions. She wasn’t. It made perfect sense now. She wasn’t surprised. She always knew that she hadn’t been an exception. Jyn wondered if they had a good laugh about her after the mess incident… if Frye had asked questions. She wondered if the woman cared at all. Probably not. She couldn’t picture the Air Wing Commander concerned with silly things like relationships during times like this. It was more likely just about sex just like everybody else on this kriffing warship.

_Just like you._

She’d told the man that she didn’t want to do it anymore, so he moved on to somebody else. End of the story. There was nothing tragic in it, yet she felt like she’d just been betrayed.

Jyn had severely underestimated her personal issues. Every part of her made its due diligence to remind her that, _of course, she would be replaced._ Her own father had, why would any other man be different? Maybe if she’d been better… but Jyn wasn’t Razana Frye. She couldn’t compete. She couldn’t hope for someone to fall in love with her just because they had sex a few times. She couldn’t keep him. She didn’t deserve to have him.

Her thoughts kept spiraling downward from that point on, out of orbit, out of control. Her sweaty palms slipped around the edges of the datapad. Jyn wanted to leave so badly but she had orders. After a virtual eternity, she knocked.

It took several critical seconds before the panel door finally slid to the side, revealing Razana Frye on the other side. No such thing as cracking a door half-open on a ship. If she looked past the woman’s shoulder, Jyn could possibly have a visual on the entirety of the statecabin. She didn’t, determined to keep her attention solely focused on Frye. The Air Wing Commander was still wearing a black flysuit, the sleeves tied-up around her waist much like Tensent had. Her dog tags hung low over her chest, and Jyn decided to use it as a focal point.

“Commander,” she said with a blank voice, “the XO sent me to review the flight routes for your next assignment.”

For a short moment, Frye didn’t answer. Something in her expression vaguely resembled surprise, but if it was, she had a way to mask it that made it hard for Jyn to decipher. She expected Frye to ask her to come back later. Instead, the woman frowned and gave it another thought.

“I haven’t been briefed yet,” she said, visibly displeased to be caught off-guard. “Where the hell are they sending us that I need a personal course with you? I remembered passing that class just fine, no offense.”

Jyn didn’t take offense in Frye’s reaction. As a matter of fact, she had expected something of the sort. The woman had countless hours of flying experience, some of it in the most inhospitable territories of the Galaxy. She perfectly knew how to read a flight chart and, in any other setting, Jyn would probably have agreed that her ‘expertise’ wasn’t essential. After reviewing the directives on her datapad, she had a different opinion on the subject. So would Frye, once she’d look for herself. But that meant—

“It’s classified,” Jyn said, tasting the tension in her words. The awkwardness of that statement burnt through her. None of them were stupid. She could have waved at Sward with the exact same effect. “Here, I’ll let you review it and we can debrief when you have a moment.” Jyn passed the datapad to Frye. “I’m back on rotation at zero six hundred, but after that, I should be in the clear.”

“Alright,” Frye said. “I’ll catch you later.”

There was nothing else to be added to the subject. Jyn took a step back and threw in a quick salute before turning heels.

She tried to persuade herself that nothing terrible or humiliating had happened, which was clearly an improvement over last time. But with each new step that she took, breathing became increasingly difficult. Now that she knew, she couldn’t stop her mind from envisioning Sward and Frye together. Worse, even: _they_ knew that she knew. Were they talking about her, right now? Were they picking up the action where she had interrupted it? Did he make love to Frye as he did to her?

_For Force’s sake, Erso— stop that shit._

Jyn slapped her palm against the cold control panel of the starboard turbolift. Then slammed it again for good measure—as if it could have magically sped up the process. She needed to do _something_. She needed an outlet for her raging emotions or she would implode. She dismissed the first thing that came to her mind. She would be caught dead before drinking _or_ fucking someone like a kriffing cure ever again. She had a better idea, anyway.

⁂

Jyn slammed her fists against the boxing bag, keeping her wrists straight, correcting her posture. She moved back and hit again, mixing her moves, repeating the same combination over and over again to develop a kinesthetic feel for the action.

She’d been at it for a solid hour. Her muscles started to feel sore, her back drenched in sweat, but she kept going. _Just a little more_ , she thought. Just a little more until she could pour out those feelings inexorably suffocating her. But no matter how hard she punched, how exhausted she made her body, she couldn’t get her mind to wear itself down.

The clock might have reset aboard the ISD _Basilisk_. The exercise room had slowly emptied, leaving Jyn short of witnesses while she tried to exorcise her demons away. So many conflicting signals buzzed under her brain that it made her dizzy. She punched again. Jab, jab, cross punch. Air tasted like metal. Jab, jab, elbow strike. Heartbeat furious.

The dread in her soul… returning. The abandon. The loneliness.

Warm brown eyes promising lies across cosmic storms.

Jyn struck the heavy boxing bag with a hard knee. It bounced from the chain. Her range was too close. A sharp pain traveled all the way up to her hip. She groaned and leaped to the side. “ _Fuck_.”

“Are you okay?”

Jyn spun so fast that she almost lost balance. A tall silhouette watched her from the far corner of the room, so silent she hadn’t heard him—those same brown eyes constantly haunting her.

“How long have you been standing here?” she growled, breathing hard.

Jeron Sward took a step forward. “Not long.” Even while his body language stayed neutral, something in his voice sounded off. “You have a deadly right hook. Where did you learn?”

Jyn frowned, letting her tired arms finally fall down. “My father paid for private training. If she can throw a punch, she doesn’t need a dad, right?”

He walked closer. Jyn refused to back down. Tearing her gaze away from the man, she unstraped her gloves. That small illusion of control calmed her beating heart, just enough that she could say: “If you’re worried that I’ll rat on you… I won’t.” She even had it in her to snicker with sarcasm. “Would be pretty stupid, considering…”

Jyn threw the gloves on the floor and started to undo the white hand-wraps that had prevented her from fracturing her bones during her workout. The tremor in her gestures was due to exhaustion, obviously. The knot in her stomach… harder to rationalize.

“I wasn’t worried about that.”

 _Good for you._ Jyn snatched one hand-wrap, right hand free, and shot him a bitter look. “Why are you here, then?”

A question she might have not wanted an answer to. For a moment, he seemed as he didn’t have one. She found it strange, alarming maybe, how a man that always had everything and everyone under control couldn’t give an answer to a question that simple.

The vortex kept on spiraling outward. Jyn pictured the ion bursts of charged particles ejected from the Maw’s Cluster. She imagined being nothing more than a black hole atom, a recipient of dark matter, with no other purpose than to serve the structure of the universe. No interaction, no light, no spectrum. Invisible. Undetectable.

Would he look past her without even trying?

“I should have come to you after last time,” Sward said, his voice so detached that it sounded like a distant transmission. “I know you heard me in the mess hall.”

Jyn squeezed the stripes of fabric in her palms to still herself. She’d been longing for this all along… and couldn’t find solace in it. She recognized a pathetic attempt at apologizing—and had it been sooner, she would have reacted differently. But she couldn’t understand why _now._ What was the point? Just for _his_ sake? Performative words, even if he claimed otherwise.

She brushed it off without compassion, keeping the walls up. “It doesn’t matter. You don’t owe me.” She meant it, even if it killed her inside. It was all for nothing. Fantasies weren’t meant to leave the dark realm of her solitude. It hurt too much to even hope.

“I want you to know— what I told them was only because I didn’t want them to pick an interest in you.”

Jyn did nothing to hide her puzzled expression. She didn’t know how to catalog this information; it didn’t fit any pattern. It made it harder to feign indifference, too. It made it _so much_ harder to ignore the furious beating of her heart. “Those people are your friends.”

“I don’t have any friends.” The tone was stark, not a personal judgment: a statement of facts.

Jyn switched her weight from one leg to the other. She couldn’t justify the conversation, nor her conflicting feelings, but she still said: “They don’t seem like bad people.”

Sward held her gaze in silence, his strong presence almost intimidating under the rigid layers of his gray uniform. Jyn felt naked in comparison, only wearing a set of PT clothing. She would’ve loved to hide behind her own uniform, to maintain some distance—but right now, Sward was talking to _Jyn._

“They’re not,” he finally said. “But I don’t do the same job as them… I don’t want to leave any trace, to anyone, pointing to you.”

This got her anxiety running and her gears spinning. She pressed her lips into a tight line, wondering how much pretending was left on his part. He looked earnest enough… but Jyn knew better than to trust anything at first glance. Not with him. Not with _anyone_. “Is this about the transport from Kessel? I heard people talking about that prisoner. They said you were the one interrogating him when he committed suicide.”

“I can’t talk about that.”

 _Right._ Jyn had lost the bigger picture. It seemed that whatever Sward had wanted to tell her, they were done talking about. But the man didn’t leave. And neither did she.

The longer they stared at each other in the empty training room, the harder Jyn had to fight to stay composed. Unaffected by his proximity. Ignoring the reminiscence of everything she knew about him… The way his eyes lit up when he looked at her. The urge to reach for him—or maybe to pick up a fight with him. She wondered if she would have been able to tackle him to the ground.

A part of her wanted nothing more than to try.

The sweat on her skin had started to evaporate, leaving her shivering in the artificial atmosphere. Jyn licked her dry lips and cave in without warning. “I just wanted to talk to you,” she whispered—knowing that he would understand even without parameters. “I figured it out… like you said… and I just wanted to share it with somebody. With _you_.”

Her confession ended quietly; a far cry from the anger-driven confrontation she had imagined. She didn’t know what to expect in return, but certainly not his next words.

“I’m not a good man,” Sward said as he tried to suppress a soul-crushing sigh. “I hoped that you wouldn’t want anything to do with me anymore… and if I just— I wanted to make it easier for myself.”

 _Easier than what?_ That’s the question Jyn wanted to ask, to shout. Instead, she said: “Did you fuck her when I left?”

The words escaped before she could entirely process them. It hit them both in unison like a tacit agreement of the situation. Sward didn’t recoil. Jyn stopped bouncing from one foot to the other. They looked at each other without walls for the first time of the night.

“Yes.”

She might have already known, but it broke her heart all the same. She didn’t have any excuse to look away from the truth. She wasn’t strong enough to stop her eyes from tearing up, ashamed of herself. And, as she looked at him through wet lashes, she registered how unhappy and miserable he looked. How much he struggled not to retreat behind a mask and protect her with empty lies.

“Did you like it better than with me?” Jyn asked with a trembling voice.

Disaster in progress. She had no logical explanation for this. And maybe it would do more damages than good but she _needed_ to know or she would suffocate.

She startled when he took another brisk step toward her. He placed both hands around her face, all while his face angled back and forth between her and the ground. She witnessed the internal battle, heard the unhappy breaths escaping him, watched his attention shifting on her once more. The usual warmth of his dark brown eyes seemed to burn like a beacon in the night sky. Jyn saw the casual indifference cracking right in front of her, opening up the floodgates.

He nervously shifted forward, his forehead on hers. “I was thinking about you the entire time,” he choked out, “trying to remember how you touched me.”

Jyn didn’t know when she had moved but realized she was holding his wrists. His febrile pulse throbbed under her fingers, maybe as proof that he wasn’t lying. Too late for an escape trajectory now. She couldn’t recalculate. She tilted her chin up knowingly. Their lips crashed together. The kiss was imprecise, hungry, desperate, with hard teeth and short breath. She didn’t care. It wasn’t a kiss to feel love, it was a kiss to feel alive. A shock to her system. A signal to reset and realign.

All of her senses seemed to heighten at once. She let go of his wrists and pushed her fingers through his neatly combed hair. His hands slid down her back, holding her waist, and pressed her flat against his body. Jyn had to tiptoe, arms crossed around his shoulders. She bit his lip, opened her mouth, regained control, lost it again. He kissed her back with more care, his nose next to hers. The short regrowth of his beard on her skin. The feel of his tongue. The pull of his hands.

At that precise moment, Jyn couldn’t be bothered to think about anything other than him. His perfume, his touch, his weight. The way he kissed her and set her nerves ablaze. The feelings she couldn’t forget. A feral need to be close to him. She didn’t have words to express that sort of urgency.

It had been _months_ since they last kissed. Five. Not that she had counted—not really.

It felt like taking her first gulp of oxygen after being left to asphyxiate in the cold, silent space. She couldn’t go without it. She had to find a way. She had to _do something about it_.

When they finally parted, breathing hard and unraveled, he touched his face to hers with a sweet motion. He kept his eyes closed and rested in the hollow of her neck, his arms sealed behind her back. She held him there with a hand on his hair, her eyes wide open into the diffuse white light.

She felt the shift just as clearly as the physical one.

Terrified and worried-sick, Jyn forced herself to say: “I want to spend the night shift with you.”

Her heart stopped, waiting for an answer. She hadn’t forgotten: terrible idea, regulations, impractical, astronomically irresponsible. All so many reasons for him to turn her down.

His lips moved on her skin, to her ear, and at first, she thought she hadn’t heard right. “You’ll have to be very quiet for that,” he said.

And Jyn knew that they had both lost their kriffing minds.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OK. I usually don’t expend much on disclaimers, but for once I just wanted to have a quick chat about the dream at the beginning of this chapter. I probably don’t need to point it out to my fellow women, but way too many times the trope of a female character resisting the man is framed in a romantic way. She finally “gives in” to the temptation, which she wanted to do anyway, and was just protesting for the form. All women are secret sluts who want to be liberated from the guilt of slut-shaming, so it’s ALL GOOD. Spoiler alert: it’s not.  
> Jyn is actively telling Cassian to fuck off both verbally and physically in her dream, and he doesn’t. I cannot stress this enough, but if someone doesn’t respect your boundaries (no matter your mindset at that moment): RED FLAG. Yes, even when it’s Cassian. I do not consider it my “duty” to write healthy relationships and I don’t try to. My characters may do harmful things to each other. If in their reality, she’d told him to back off and he acted the same way he did in her dream, he would be in the wrong, no matter what he might think she wants, no matter what she actually wants. The only difference here is that Jyn’s brain comes up with this scenario, she knows that she wants him to insist so she can find relief in it. It’s rooted in her abandonment issues driving her to push people away to see if they actually care about her. This is not a healthy response and it’s not glamorous, but it’s her reality. In short: those two people need therapy. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
> 
> PS: I hope you enjoyed this chapter and as always, I'd really appreciate a comment from you 💙💙💙 Stay safe out here!


	6. Countermeasures

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Cassian realizes that he's fucked.

**06\. Countermeasures**

**_D-32_ **

Cassian had never been a Force’s favorite but, at this point, it started to feel personal.

He'd crossed so many lines already, he didn't even register this one. Too late. The things he'd never planned on doing… the questions she shouldn't have asked… the lies he _should have_ said to save it. He had no explanation other than the obvious: he'd become unreliable. A done deal.

Cassian Andor had lost control and no one was here to stop him.

Around 0100, ship-time, Commander Sward unlocked his cabin door with a small shadow behind him. On the top bunk, the other officer lay fast asleep. Unsurprising. The man had a morning watch scheduled, approximately five hours from now, and so did Jyn.

Cassian gestured for her to walk to his bunk. In the half-darkness of the small berthing, she quietly disappeared in the lower sleeping space. With equally silent footsteps, he crossed the room and stored Jyn's training bag inside his personal locker, hidden from view. He collected her shoes and took some time to unlace his boots before getting rid of the gray uniform. Every other night, undressing brought him some scraps of comfort—a performer leaving the stage, if only in his mind. Tonight, Cassian couldn’t escape.

From the mission… or from himself. ( _Any means necessary._ ) The plea of a selfish man.

Down to a black pair of underwear, he joined Jyn in his bunk and closed the privacy curtain that he so rarely bothered to use. A faint glow of flickering reddish light persisted around them, caressing the familiar features of the woman lying next to him. The illusion of intimacy would've made it easy to forget that another person was sleeping above them. A dangerous game to play, hand too close to the fire. But, as he looked at Jyn facing him on her side, Cassian realized the horrifying truth: those rules were meant for Jeron Sward. (Shredding the burden. Cutting ties. Depersonification. Desynchronization.) Cassian Andor didn't give a flying fuck anymore.

( _an undercover agent will not engage in sexual contact._ )

Their hands brushed. He couldn't tell if by accident or design. Anticipation buzzed under his too-tight skin, his limbs ached. He’d engineered every one of the steps leading to this moment but he hadn’t accounted for the sleeping defect in his program. She’d cracked it open, extended the invitation, and he couldn’t rebuild the frontier around his dire need of ( _someone_ ) her.

Cassian arched his tense body over her. He buried his face in the hollow of her neck, instinctively looking to hide the signs of imminent collapse. Years of suppression: the inability to show genuine emotions, the danger to break free from that pillory. His arms circled her with measured, silent gestures, trying not to shake. Not to _betray_. Jyn mirrored his hold. She slid a leg between his thighs to fit closer—closer than she used to be. Something had shifted. The feather-light touch of her loose hair tickled his cheek. He breathed in the scent of her skin, palms flat on her back, her small body molded into his arms like sacred salvation.

He’d tricked himself. This masquerade had always been for his sake, yes, and even now—when he had to pursue his leads—Cassian clung to her like a lifeline. The only person he hadn’t scared out of sharing something real with him. And he had done so much _worse_ to others, but couldn’t forget how painful it felt, deep in his guts, to be the cause of her tears. _Why_ did it have to be her? What would happen when he would go dark, or (more likely) get killed? When she would discover the unforgivable truth—when he would fail to flip her?

Jyn’s chest slowly rose and fell to match his trained breathing, oblivious to the cheap tragedy playing in Cassian’s mind. He curled around her as much as he could, bringing every part of them together for as long as she would let him. Trying to confess his crimes without words… the last escape of a coward man, shadowed in duty and martyrdom. He didn't deserve to hold her but he'd been too weak and miserable to say it. The tentative warmth of her body reached him through thin layers of clothing, soothing. _You’ll be so cold if you stay, Jyn. You’re not meant to be here. I know where you belong._

He recognized the damaging vice: that same possessiveness returning, always. It made him sick to the core. Jyn wasn't _his,_ but he sure as fuck acted like she had no choice but to be. After so long, maybe he’d finally been reprogrammed as one of them. Binary thinking. _Theirs or mine. Imperial or Rebel. Guilty or innocent._ As if it meant anything at all… in this war… or any other. But the idea that he wanted something— _someone—_ so deeply… out of sole selfishness. Terribly _human_ , after all.

Was it inevitable? The result of too many sacrifices? The rebellion of a decaying organism?

( _You don’t get to have her just because you suffer from a fucking savior complex. She’s not the prize you get for labeling yourself as a pathological good guy. You want her to be your reward, you sick fuck. But you don’t get to strip her from her agency. She’s not helpless. She’s not blameless. She has a voice. She has accountability. Ask her. Make yourself bleed for it… if you want it that much. If you care that much. Find out what you really_ deserve.)

Her fingers spread in his hair, gentle and caring, sending a shiver of ease down his spine. Relief. Another mockery of his pathetic life: where everything else had failed (pain/promiscuity/intoxicants/psychotropics), he wondered how her touch alone could make it all so much more bearable whilst he felt like dying. He only knew that he hadn’t earned it. Cassian dragged his hand up to her neck, searching for an answer by trial, gently brushing her skin with his thumb, feeling her pulse—so alive. They couldn’t talk but he didn’t need to. Didn’t want to. Looking at her was enough to share _,_ better than lying.

The blazing heat of their kiss was nowhere to be found while he touched her like an astral mirage, which proved to be his last, fatal mistake. He’d bargained with himself: just one night off the logs. But he’d let himself hold her with too much honesty, even by his godforsaken standards. The blatant truth struck him like a blade, at last.

And no one had written guidelines for this.

Jyn Erso, for the first time, slept in his arms. Cassian did not. The hours went by, undisrupted during the rest of the night, while he blinked into crimson darkness. Never looking away from her. The agony was unbearable. _If you’re the last face I ever see, it would be enough. At least, I know you cared._

The muffled sounds of the _Basilisk—_ creaking and rattling of steel, distant ion engines, high-frequency electrical hums, constant airflow—made it impossible to forget that he was nothing but a dead man running on borrowed time. Yet, he wouldn’t give it back.

With Jyn curled up on his chest, and a faint sense of irony later, Cassian started to fantasize of another time and place. Aboard a rebel ship flying fastlines, or on Dantooine, maybe. Hell, he would get her anywhere—anywhere but here. _How do I come back from this? How do I keep going?_ He’d already determined that Jyn wasn’t a candidate for recruitment. Taking a chance on her in spite of all his years of experience would only put a target on his back, at best. But he kept thinking about it, kept holding her like a fool, wondering if a god out there would take pity on that lost soldier dying to find a way back home.

By 0530, Jyn’s slow pattern of breathing started to show… irregularities. He let his focus shift on the weight of her body against him, let himself sink deeper—just for a second ( _liar_ )—and allowed himself to feel her. The magnetic pull between the two of them; that same thrill of foreign emotions that might have corrupted his brain the more she kissed him. Cassian would’ve killed to let her grind herself on him, but he couldn’t forget the delicate surroundings they were operating in. Before she could make any incriminating sound, he put a hand on her mouth and stroked her back to ease her from her sleep. She woke up in a tremor. She recognized his presence fast enough that he didn’t earn a punch in the face. After seeing her training, no doubt it would’ve hurt.

They looked into each other’s eyes for a small eternity, heartbeat racing, so close that her breath felt warm on his skin. Jyn lowered her head, chin on his shoulder. She bore that criminal longing in her sleepy gaze… (the one he wanted to answer.) Cassian withdrew his hand just to brush the pad of his thumb over her soft lips, hypnotized by the way she kissed it. His broken mind even entertained the dangerous idea of fucking her right there, right now. Force knows he needed to.

She knew it, too, and did nothing to extinguish that fire. Her left leg draped over his hips and her lips slowly exploring his fingers, Cassian let out a frustrated sigh. The game wasn’t worth the trouble—should _not_ have been. He followed the curve of her back, regardless, and slid one hand inside her jog pants, resting low on her ass. He only had himself to blame when Jyn decided that rolling her hips against his half-hard cock was an acceptable idea. Impossible to evade in such a small space. Cassian had never lacked control, especially not on sexual impulses. He would have made a poor spy to override the mission parameters anytime someone tried to engage with him. But, right now, he hesitated between cursing her in five different languages and moving with her.

He’d obsessed over her so damn much during the past months. When he was alone, when he was _not_. But having her, here, now…

Jyn’s eyes appeared darker in the shadows while she cataloged his reactions. He caught her chin and tilted her head back, bringing her lips closer to reach. “Stop,” he carefully whispered.

“Make me.”

That startled him like nothing else, a new spike of interest running under his burning skin. Cassian blinked a few times to process it. If he hadn’t been turn-on already, this would have done the trick just fine. From the first time that he’d undressed her, Jyn had never been hesitant. That buried, residual sense of self couldn’t get enough of her discovery—wanted to know every limit, every nuance of her. Unweaponized. But it wasn’t, and it was madness. So why did he squeeze her ass and turn more of his body towards her?

“I hope I was in your dream,” he said over a murmur.

Jyn forcibly exhaled, their brows touching. “It’s always you.”

Cassian almost winced, unused to such incriminating words of endearment. His chest burned, heavy. _It’s always you for me, too._

How strange to want someone, not just anyone. This one person elected among all the beings he’d ever encountered in this boundless galaxy. To have all his anonymous phantasms suddenly morphed into a pair of stardust eyes. He’d never felt that sort of irrational attachment to anyone before. Never felt the hard bruising in his ribcage at words like hers. Never wanted something for his own selfish gain more than her. It sprang so many questions in his mind.

But right now, Cassian simply _wanted_.

…to kiss her, to feel her naked, to make love to her, to come inside her.

…to hear her say his birth-given name.

Running in circles. Consent didn’t absolve. Wanting didn’t excuse. No matter the angle, shining a light on his actions only painted them darker. Cassian was drowning in a sea too deep to escape unharmed, crushed under pressure, forgotten from rescue.

The double-edged irony of his life wasn’t lost on him.

(Un)fortunately (depending on the scope lens), the waking sounds of his bunkmate put a sudden halt to their unruly conduct. They both froze, dead silent, tightly pressed against one another, and waited. It took nerve-wracking long minutes for the man to hop from his bunk, get dressed, and gather some necessities. From the sound of a rustling towel, Cassian imagined him heading to the showers. The door slid open. Following the man, his low-toned, customary morning whistling happily exited the space with him.

Cassian breathed out. Jyn kissed him.

_— It’s the last time, I can’t do this anymore._

He kissed back just as eagerly. His brain flashed red. She pulled at him and rolled on her back. Cassian moved on top of her with just too much of a habit for his peace of mind. Her thighs grabbed a strong hold of him, forcing him down in the most agonizing way. Jyn moaned when he pressed his hard body between her legs, the few layers of clothing between them doing nothing to disguise the fact that he wanted to fuck her more than he wanted to breathe.

_— Aren’t you going to ask why?_

Her nails scraped the bare skin between his shoulder blades in a way, he knew, that would leave red marks for a few hours. She had the right to. Cassian followed the intensity of her kiss without restraint, lost in her sweet taste. Their tongues met like the rest of their bodies, caressing and demanding. They found back the pattern of their kisses, heads tilted, perfect execution, muscle memory. It wasn’t supposed to be this simple, but with her… Jyn grabbed his hair and freed a low grunt from his throat. His hands roamed over her flesh, inside the clothes he wasn’t supposed to take off.

They had ten minutes, fifteen if hot water had held up the previous shift, before his bunkmate came back. It could’ve been enough… but it _wasn’t_ enough. Not even close. How quickly would they assign another officer to the cabin if Cassian killed this one?

_— We’re right where we ought to be._

Unsustainable path. Unreliable. Out of control. Breaking the kiss left him bitter and empty. The crude knowledge that it could be the last time he ever got to indulge in it made him miserable beyond words. He wanted her forever.

Ignoring the painful begging of his body, Cassian forced himself to say: “That's your window. You need a shower before your shift.”

Jyn made a visible effort to catch her breath but didn’t move. She nipped at his bottom lip, hands on his shoulders. “Are you suggesting that I _stink_?”

A half-smile appeared on Cassian’s face, unexpected for such a bruised soul. He suppressed it by kissing her jawline, nose in her hair, coming up to her ear. “You smell of me.” _And I want to smell of you._ “And I need a cold shower.” Hoth-freezing cold. _Does it make it better or worse jerking off thinking of you if you’re thinking of me, too?_

It took a moment for Jyn to loosen up her legs around his hips, granting him virtual freedom. He hadn’t moved just yet when she asked: “Is this gonna take another five months before we talk to each other again?” The underlying sadness in her voice pierced through him like a blaster bolt.

_I won’t last another five months, Jyn. Come with me, I’ll show you home._

Cassian kissed her lips again to shut his words. Never before had he been this fearful to go off script, spill his deeds at her feet, and beg for forgiveness. Jyn wouldn’t go for grandiose ideas and heroism. She wasn’t fighting that kind of fight. She wouldn’t relate; she had too many issues of her own to be able to make that leap of faith. She read to him like a decrypted file, so easy to access. She needed to be pushed over to react. If he wanted to flip her… he’d have to come clean and punch where it hurt the most—to rip the mask off and show the unglorifying, nasty reality of this war… including his own terrible actions. A terrible bargain.

Whatever she thought she might have felt for him, it wouldn’t survive the blow. This little fantasy of his was hopeless. To get her out was to lose her.

“No,” he said like a man too comfortable in his lies.

Part of it was true and had nothing to do with his obsession of Jyn Erso. Cassian took a deep breath, a last one to remember her perfume, and rolled off her. He opened the privacy curtain and pushed his legs over the edge to stand up, a hand on the upper bunk to avoid a head injury. (He should have tried to bang his brain upside down, just to see…) Walking to his locker on stiff legs, Cassian seeked control back. The effort seemed pointless, like holding sand in his hands. Most of it trickled through his fingers. Nothing to hold on to. His head pounded. He grabbed Jyn’s bag and boots and searched through his equipment before turning back. She sat on his bunk, waiting, face flushed and hair down. Painfully beautiful. He walked her belongings to her, shielding his thoughts behind a spy face.

“Here, take this.”

Jyn extended a hand to grab the offered comlink. She raised a questioning eyebrow, surveying the non-standard, encryption-equipped model. “Unregistered?”

_I will forever hate myself over this, Jyn. There’s no absolution for me. You have no fucking idea how hard I want to break character. You have no idea what it truly takes to be at war. The things you do… why can’t you walk away on your own? Why did you let me do this to you?_

“You don't seem to mind breaking some rules,” Cassian said with a curved smile. “Keep it on you, I don't want it into someone else's hands.”

She nodded and packed the comlink with the rest of her belongings. Cassian waited for her to slide her boots on, unmoving. His skin had turned cold where she wasn’t pressed anymore. Bag hanging over her shoulder, Jyn eyed the door. She returned her attention to him. Cassian braced himself, reading microexpressions before she even formed the words.

“Are you still gonna be with Frye?”

“I'm not with her.”

The non-answer seemed to satisfy Jyn. It shouldn’t have. It was banthashit. She made it too easy but he couldn’t tell if it was for her sake or his own. Or, worse, for the sake of the lie. She might have been learning already. _Don’t do this to yourself, I’m begging you. I’m doing it for both of us._

Unless he hadn’t understood the question.

“Are you with me?” she said, unabashed.

Air left his lungs. Cassian’s skin shivered, a gravity-void in the pit of his stomach. _Not for the lie, then._ Once again, his attempts to restore some semblance of control drifted out of reach. He took a step forward. Jyn’s back leaned against the door. She raised her chin to look at him, his hands coming around her neck, gently holding her.

“Not here, not now,” he said—and let the truth unfold, his voice softer. “But I want to. If I ever get the opportunity… You have no idea how much I want to, Jyn.”

“I believe you.”

Cassian let out a weak breathing sound. He touched his face on the side of hers. His resilience was burning out faster than any ion thrusters, reaching a new critical low. “We’ll talk later,” he promised. She turned her head, looking for a kiss. Eyes closed, lips sealed, hands in her hair.

“Below the hangar deck,” she whispered, “where we first met.”

“Yes,” he agreed.

Then the door slid open and she was gone.

Cassian stood in the middle of the cabin, petrified, damaged. Left alone with his ghosts and his guilt. Only when a salty taste touched his lips did he have the presence of mind to wipe his face and move on with his schedule.

⁂

Cassian scanned the flight logs, cross-referencing. In the middle of the deck, Vortex Squadron scattered away without the usual level of banter following Tensent’s pilots. Cassian’s eyes followed the leader's black uniform until he walked out of view, leaving his TIE fighter to the deckhands. A fresh laser scar ran across the polished silver metal, right above the main transparisteel viewport. Close call. Tensent hadn’t reported any dogfight—and most likely would not.

Interesting ploy.

“Commander Sward,” called a voice behind him.

Cassian straightened his posture, turning away from the deck, datapad under his arm. “What can I do for you, Chief?”

Del Meeko, chief engineer, stopped in front of him, wiping his large hands with an oil-smelling rag. “I wanted to let you know that I’ve put the IT-O back at work, the one you had a problem with.”

 _Shit._ Switching gears, his brain swiftly recalculated the most pressing issues. “Ah, good,” Cassian said, waiting for the situation to unfold without his input.

“I’ve done a complete reboot and diagnosed every sensor,” Meeko explained with a frown, “ _twice_. But I couldn’t find the problem. I didn’t want to send it back without an answer, but it wasn’t up to me.”

“I understand.”

“I’ve never had a torture droid bypassing master-security and harming the operator… I’m not sure what to tell you. I suggest _caution_ if you work with it again.”

Cassian observed the man’s face attentively. He had an over-honest friendly demeanor most of the time, which made it all the more easy to read the subtext now glaring in his eyes: _I know it’s impossible for the events to have been as reported. I can’t prove it and don’t know what’s going on but you’re not fooling me. This is your warning._

Cassian was positive he wouldn’t get another one. He wasn’t even sure of the reason keeping Meeko from opening an investigation and passing on his concerns to higher authorities. Considering the incident involved the unforeseen death of a prisoner—before anything useful could have been extracted from him—this would have been standard procedure.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Cassian said, “thanks for the heads-up.”

“No problem.” Meeko politely nodded. “Going back to work.”

Cassian’s time on the _Basilisk_ was coming to an even more abrupt end than anticipated. And while he resumed his mental mapping of Vortex Squadron, classified flight charts, and Razana Frye’s private conversations—a part of him dangerously remained fixed on Jyn Erso.

There were only so many ways to go from here. None of them included reciprocal love.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've literally written this chapter 4 times with so many changes and I'm losing my kriffin' mind over it, so I've decided to pull the plug and save my last brain cell. I /really/ hope you've enjoyed it (for all the despair in my soul)!! Merry and Dopt both voted to keep the UST going, so there you go, you get what you're paying for! 😂 
> 
> Thank you all so much for your comments on the previous chapter, I'm very late in my replies because all my energy was focused on writing this uncooperative part. But just so you know: I appreciate every single one of you and you're saving my motivation every time ❤️ xxx


	7. Safeguard

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I had a dream like that,” she said.

**07\. Safeguard**

**_D-2_ **

“Get a transfer, then. I’m sure your father can arrange that.”

Jyn had a moment of weakness, breath itching in her throat. She hadn’t been prepared to hear those words. She’d never talked much about her father with Jeron but she figured—given the nature of his job—that he had made the connection early on. Not that it was a secret, anyway.

She still felt a jab of pain, thinking that he might have shared the views of some others when it came to the question of her personal merit. She wanted him to see her for herself. Jyn. Just _Jyn_.

“I don’t want a transfer,” she said dryly.

Behind her, the loud airflow pulsing through the ventilation system covered some of the crashing in her voice. Confined inside the small fan room, behind a closed hatch door, the lack of light would hopefully mask any other display of emotions.

She didn’t want to play victims. She knew how she sounded… begging him to be there as soon as she'd escaped her shift. But he hadn’t been the one in the CIC today… He didn’t sit there while a mining shipment was engaged, departing from a neighbor system. He didn’t listen to the agonizing distress calls of unarmed transports being annihilated by Rebel forces faster than their squadrons could intercept. He did not intrude on the last message one of the pilots sent to his family, knowing that the comms would be registered by the _Basilisk_ —and the sudden void left behind when he failed to name his second child, out of time.

Yes, she was emotional. Yes, she was desperate. And Jeron didn’t get the right to tell her how to _feel_. It was unfair. She wouldn’t stand for it.

Jyn pressed her lips into a hard line, bracing herself for his next words. He might have been good at keeping everything away from her reach, but she'd learned some of his tells. The small things that he quite couldn’t control, it was all in his eyes. A flicker of anger in the ocean of his dark brown eyes.

“So what do you want?” he asked, urgency laced in his voice. He wasn't cold, but she felt the intentional distance between them. “ _What_ do you want? Close your eyes and pretend like it’s not happening? You said you wanted to do something useful. You can’t pick and choose what you care about because things get uncomfortable for you. This war isn’t going anywhere, wake the fuck up!”

Jeron slapped the flat of his hand against the wall, leaning on it as if he was too afflicted to stand on his own. Jyn gaped at him. She’d never seen him like this. The fire raging in his dark eyes felt different than any other. She wanted to be angry, too. She had it in her, but it was more of a reaction than an impulse. A defensive mechanism, cheap and transparent.

“Don’t talk to me like I’m a kriffin’ child,” she managed. “You have no idea.”

He paced himself, looking at her without making a move. Despite what she'd just said, she did feel like a child (maybe acting like one) under his guarded stare.

“I’m pretty sure I know what you’re feeling.”

Her face burned with a new wave of heat. She pushed back. “No, you don’t!”

Jeron looked away for a moment. Jyn panicked. In the back of her mind, that familiar, dreadful fear of rejection came back to mingle with her thoughts and blur the lines. Maybe she went too far. Maybe she pushed too hard. She didn’t want to. She didn’t want to shut him down. She didn’t want to be left _alone_. She had no one else.

But she couldn’t silence herself, either.

“I’ve been doing this job for a long time, Jyn.” If his voice didn’t change, he took a step closer, standing right in front of her. She resisted the urge to reach for him, too anxious to hear what he had to say. “I know that you’re scared… confused. I know that you’re questioning your choices, your actions. Everyone’s actions.”

Jyn’s heart stopped. A shiver of terror ran down her spine. She couldn’t possibly misinterpret the words. The very reason she had vowed to stay away from him in the first place came back to slap her in the face. She fought to react, a burning lump in her throat, shaking on her feet. She always knew this had been a mistake. Now, she had to pay for it.

“If that’s what you believe… why am I not in the brig right now? Is it just because you fucked me?”

Her voice, barely audible, trembled on the last part.

“You don’t need to deflect,” Jeron said, all too neutral. “I’m not accusing you of anything.”

“Oh, aren’t you?” The sudden anger on her tongue tasted like acid. She instantly regretted it ( _it’s not what I meant to say, please don’t leave me_ ) but she couldn’t bypass the anxiety tumbling in her brain. Every word coming out of her mouth could be a death sentence if she weren’t careful. Just because it was _him_ didn’t change the nature of the exchange… She had enough paranoia to even consider a set-up.

“It’s hard when the world stops being black and white, isn’t it?”

He said the words with such unforeseen compassion that Jyn wondered if she had missed part of the conversation. Her eyes opened wider, her sweaty hands clutched against her chest like a barrier. She looked at him for what felt like an eternity, fighting so many wars in her mind. Her ears rang from the pressurized noises surrounding them, deafening, just like her scattered thoughts. Trying to find solid ground among quicksands.

At last, desperate, Jyn said: “The Empire is my _home_.” A performative lie, but she had to say it. If she repeated it enough, eventually, she would convince herself. Isn’t that what he wanted… ?

A fleeting expression crossed Jeron’s face, his jaws too tight, a vein pulsing hard down his neck. Then, it was gone and Jyn blindly tripped over its memory, wondering if the shadows had deceived her. She didn’t know what to expect, but certainly not his hand on her arm, gentle, and his face closer to her. This wasn’t a fight anymore. Had she lost already?

“If you truly believed that,” he said like he had all the time in the galaxy, “you wouldn’t need me to hold you the way I do.”

She frowned from confusion, unable to distance herself from him. Unwilling to. “Why are you saying this to me?”

“You don’t need to pretend when we’re alone. You don’t need to be someone that you’re not.”

Nested under that deep layer of fear, a foolish hope started to blossom inside her too-tight chest. She knew she should have smoldered it, right there and then, but she failed to. She wanted to cling to it, to bask in it. Could it be that he understood? Could it be that he felt the _same way_? Too dangerous to ask, still, but Jyn couldn’t help but put a hand over his chest, holding the hemline of the gray uniform. _Stay with me._

“Is this the real you?” she whispered, unsure he could hear her voice.

He read her lips instead. The lines around his eyes softened. She’d noticed that shift, often, when he looked at her. She’d tried not to think about it, not to think about _them_. But the days went and the dynamics were lost on her. It wasn’t about the sex anymore, that much was clear. Hadn’t been since… maybe, never. She wanted something else, even if she hadn’t allowed herself to say it.

She’d let herself fall in love with the austere, distant, and unapologetic man that she’d discovered to be so much more complex than the blasterproof facade he displayed to the world—and it posed new challenges, all equally terrifying.

“A part of him,” Jeron said.

“Which part?”

“The part that wants to stay with you. The better part.”

Jyn closed her eyes, wishing it could be enough. _Please, stay._ “Sometimes, I feel like I’ve known you all along… and sometimes, I realize I don’t know you at all.”

His hand brushed her cheek, curling behind her neck, messing her hair up.

“You’re thinking in absolutes,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be. Nothing truly is.”

 _Love has to be absolute_ , Jyn thought, because, otherwise, she didn’t want it. She didn’t want something that would betray her like everyone else. She wanted that all or nothing. She wanted what her parents had, what she _thought_ they had. And, hidden from view, she already knew that Jeron couldn’t give her that. But who could, in times like these, when families were being broken apart each day? When lovers didn’t come home and children were left without parents? Jyn was too involved, now, to be left with nothing.

“I want to know you,” she said, “not just a part.”

“Trust goes both ways,” Jeron said.

_I’ll give you everything if loving you isn’t an error._

She nodded, face against his chest. Nothing felt warmer than his arms around her. It was an addictive feeling, more powerful than logic or fear. A sense of security that Jyn hadn’t experienced since childhood, since her father—

She pushed on her toes and circled her arms around his neck, holding him close. She breathed on his neck and let her lips touch his skin. The way he twitched just from that kiss gave Jyn a reason to leave another one just a bit lower.

Jeron’s hands traveled to her waist and held her there to help her balance. Soon, she had her fingers at the base of his neck, caressing and playing with the shorter hair. Her mouth came to his own. He tasted like his last caf, hot and bitter. Standing taller than her, he had to bend down to keep their lips touching, never putting distance between the rest of their bodies. He kissed like a man drunk on something stronger than liquor.

Jyn remembered her first kiss. She was seventeen, he was a bit older. He was in training to become a starfighter pilot. He always said nice things to her. She liked him. Dark hair, dark eyes, always a bright smile to greet her. She liked it when he waited for her in front of the Royal Academy. They’d been friends for a while, she could feel his interest sometimes… in the way he looked at her. She wasn’t sure if she wanted more. She waited, and waited, until he had to be shipped off-world to complete his training. So, before he left, she kissed him at the depart bay, moments short of the dusk settling down over Coruscant.

A first kiss to say goodbye. Like so many things in Jyn’s life, her first taste of love had been one of loss.

She’d never seen him again. He’d been killed in action, two years later, taking with him his dreams of infinite skies and distant stars.

She never spoke of him to anyone. She never went to his funerals. She had said goodbye already… _take with you all the things we almost were, and the ones we never had a chance to be._ Three years later and Jyn had forgotten the sound of his voice. She’d forgotten every little thing she liked about him. But she never forgot the tears she cried the night she found out, and the promise she’d made to herself: the next time she’d kiss someone, it wouldn’t be for _goodbyes_.

Jeron knew how to do that. He always made it taste like love, even if he didn’t have to, and Jyn momentarily forgot about the struggles of her mind, surrendering everything just to live in his arms for a while. Relief from pain. Mutual comfort. Desire.

“I had a dream like that,” she said.

“Interesting.” Jeron kissed a spot right below her ear, mirroring her actions. “Tell me more.”

“What about we don’t talk anymore?” Jyn asked, her head falling a little more backward with each kiss he left down the column of her throat.

She hadn’t made up her mind about the extent of her suggestion just yet. She craved his affection and his touch. He had a special way of getting under her skin and it had been such a long time since they had any chance to be intimate. So, here, maybe not her first choice of location… but not entirely excluded. (At least, they were alone: a rare luxury.) Jyn decided to let him call the shots.

“I don’t know,” he said with a hoarse voice. “You make me feel horny.”

Jyn arched her back to perfectly mold her body against him. One of his legs slid between hers. Not a single atom of vacant space was left between them, colliding stars, the birth of a new equilibrium. She gripped his strong shoulders, his hands behind her to support her weight. Her heartbeat madly quickened, in tune with her breathing. Each time they touched… entropy at play… Jyn entered a new orbit.

“Yeah,” she said, “that’s what I meant… less talk, more hands.”

A short contained laugh rippled into her body from where his solid chest was pressed against her. Something she had heard so rarely that she almost gasped. It was gone just as fast… like he had been reminded of some unspoken rules preventing him from enjoying himself. Jyn wanted to hear him laughing all day, every day. His voice felt like sunrise, just as much as the accent in his words when he said in her ear: “I know exactly what you meant, baby.”

An anomaly of space and time. Had it been anyone else with the nerves to call her ‘baby’, she would have punched them in the face. But on his tongue, it felt… different. Strangely compelling at that moment. Maybe because he was the first person in her adult life to call her something else than _Jyn_ or _Lieutenant Erso_. A lot of firsts for just one man… She didn’t mind that teasing, then.

“Show me,” she challenged.

Jyn knew what she had asked for, but she still felt some surprise when her belt unclasped from her waistline. Jeron let it fall to the ground and started to unbutton her uniform jacket within the same breath. Jyn reached his lips again. He led her back with slow steps, his body like a guide, until she could lean against the wall.

_Now, I really had a dream like this._

The intense memory made her blush, thankful to the monochrome dark for keeping her sheepish secrets. Jyn moved against him, his hands reaching inside her clothes, the warm touch of his rough fingers against her sides and ribs. She exhaled harder, shaken by the coiling desire at the base of her spine. His hands brushed up, cupping her breasts through the thin layer of her bra. Jyn closed her eyes again, unsteady on her feet. She moaned a low sound of eagerness when his thumb teased a nipple. His lips went back to her neck, biting the sensitive skin where people wouldn’t see, leaving his mark on her.

She disintegrated on the spot, crashing pieces of meteors entering the stratosphere. Nothing subsisted from her distressed brain, only the awareness of his proximity and his contact. The re-entering of a familiar system, smelling like musk and shaving cream. He breathed harder, too, chest heaving, suppressing his voice to hear her own.

A painful nerve unraveled in her. _Finally_ , he could touch her better than she knew how to touch herself.

Cold air ghosted against her naked skin, where her uniform had been pushed aside. Her jacket opened, falling from her shoulders, her undershirt pushed above her stomach. Her pants low on her hips, his hand inside it, gently moving and prying quiet pleas from her lips.

One of her hands stayed in his hair, where his face was pressed to her throat. Jyn breathed another moan of pleasure, louder, feeling hot and soft under his touch. He slipped inside her underwear, the heel of his hand flat against short, trimmed hair, putting a gentle pressure over a pulsing point. His fingers glided eagerly between her legs, an expanding feeling of lust inside her body. Her hips jerked against him, compelled to chase after that sweet ecstasy. He bit her earlobe with a groan and Jyn almost moaned his name, short of breath.

She thought about how much she wanted to be naked in bed with him again.

“I can’t leave you here,” he said into her hair. And it didn’t make sense but it was the only thing she wanted to hear for the rest of her life. “If I go… Jyn, you know this isn’t home.”

He kissed her swollen lips, hard, almost trembling. Erratic and heavy breaths mingled. She felt the deep frown between his brows, where he pressed against her skin. Jyn chased after him, her teeth grazing his bottom lip. She still had a hand wound into his hair, the other came to his neck. His heartbeat felt like thunder. They were stalling for time, running away from something—and she didn’t know what. ( _War. Disaster._ _Everything_.)

“Don’t go,” Jyn said, and it was almost an order, so certain that he _could not_ leave her. “You have to stay with me.”

It felt so good to be this much alive.

“I’ll try for you.”

⁂

Jyn met with Razana Frye and her pilots in one of the Air Wing briefing rooms. She’d been appointed by Mullinore, over a month ago, to review the squadron’s mission and assist in the preparation. Departing from the ISD _Basilisk_ , Frye and her squadron would intercept their target just outside of the Kessa system and escort the highly sensitive cargo shipment to an Imperial research center. The importance of the delivery had been made extremely clear to everyone involved.

Located in the midst of the Maw Cluster, the classified installation was surrounded by a virtually unnavigable cluster of black holes (which made it such an efficient hiding spot). The few safe routes to reach the research facility required impeccable skills and great precision. Any navigational mistake would result in a catastrophic failure, sending ships into gravity wells from where there was no escape.

Jyn had personally drafted most of the flight chart. Frye would be in charge of leading the convoy while assuring its security. The past months had seen an unprecedented spike in Rebel activity along the major axis of transport. It wasn’t rare anymore to hear that the Imperial Navy had been cutting losses, as unthinkable as it might have sounded not so long ago. The enemy seemed to get more organized by the minute, and Rebel Intelligence was on the lookout for the Maw Installation, or so Command thought.

Jyn didn’t want to lose anyone under her care. Frye was one of the best pilots of the Starfighter Corps. She was more than capable of pulling a mission like this one.

The meeting ended twenty minutes later. With pilots exiting the room and Jyn dropping her professional face, she was left alone with the Air Wing Commander.

“Nice work,” the blonde woman said.

Standing on the other side of a holodisplay, Jyn slightly raiser her head. “Thanks.” Cautious was the only word to describe Jyn’s attitude in that instant. She’d never earned small talk from Frye before, and she was unsure if she wanted to indulge.

But Frye was a straight shooter. She leaned against the tactical console and crossed her arms. “I was surprised they trusted someone so young with a classified mission.”

Tension flared up across Jyn’s face. She straightened her back, not anywhere near as tall as the other woman, and watched her tone. “I’m the best astrogation tech on that ship,” she said.

Frye gave her an amused grin. “That’s not what I’m saying.”

“What are you saying?” Jyn asked, unmoving.

Frye stopped smiling. “What kind of pillow talk are you having with Sward?”

Jyn felt as if the artificial gravity had suddenly increased by 10G. Her throat constricted, suffocating, and a guilty silence plagued the room. She had so many thoughts at once, she didn’t know how to process any of them. Panic began to sink in while she relocated most of her energy just to maintain a neutral facade.

“I know he's been seeing you for the past month,” Frye continued, unfazed, “because he stopped coming to me.”

Jyn stared in silence. What was she supposed to say to that? _Deny_?

“Take a breath. I don't give a shit about what you do off the clock. But you have to admit, it looks hella convenient.”

Instantly, Jyn’s brain started to unclog. And it looked bad. “What do you mean?” she asked, a defensive frown creasing her brows.

Frye uncrossed her arms, hands on the belt of her black uniform. Her sharp gaze reflected the blue light of the nearby holomaps like a signal to open fire. “Fucking the Ace… then fucking the navigation officer, as soon as you show up with classified flight charts. I just find it interesting. Of course, I have nothing to support the idea, but you're a smart girl. _The best on that ship_. You know where I'm getting at.”

Jyn went rigid. Even the simple act of breathing seemed excruciating. Her first instinct was to defend him. _How dare you? What the fuck is wrong with you? We’ve been fucking way before that. He was mine before yours. This has nothing to do with a mission. You don’t know him. I’ll beat your face to the deck if you say that shit to someone else._

But something else came with it.

“I've never discussed anything classified with him,” Jyn said, so tense she could almost hear her teeth cracking. “He never asked. _Never_.”

“Hmm. I guess time will tell. I hope I'm wrong, he's a good laid.” Frye made a move to vacant the briefing room. “But if I die on that one, someone will have to make something of it.”

And the idea stayed.

_— Are you okay?_

_— One day, you'll stop wishing and you'll start doing something about it._

_— I don’t want to leave any trace, to anyone, pointing to you._

_— I know that you’re questioning your choices, your actions. Everyone’s actions._

_— If I go… Jyn, you know this isn’t home._

The idea… _stayed._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 😵😵😵


	8. Catastrophic Failure

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which everything goes wrong and you start screaming at me.
> 
> cw: blood and injury

**08\. Catastrophic Failure**

**_H-6_ **

_Fuck Frye._

Cassian had made a mistake. She was too smart for that sort of game. She’d picked up the pattern. She’d ruined his impression on Jyn—

Correction: he’d ruined it himself by waiting too long. But what else could he have done? He needed those coordinates. He couldn’t fuck up the entire mission for her sake. He got the job done, sent the intel to the Alliance. And did her so wrong in the process. Collateral damages. Non-innocent victim. The price of war.

_— I've never discussed anything classified with him. He never asked. Never._

She sounded so abrasive while defending him. Ready to fight for him. It was excruciating to listen to, when he knew how despicable he truly was. But Jyn wasn’t stupid either, and her loyalty was meant to face the world. She wouldn’t be so easily convinced in the privacy of her feelings. She would think about it, she would ask for proof. She would confront him for the truth.

Cassian was willing to risk it.

“This is your rendez-vous point,” he told Nath Tensent without an ounce of emotion. “You have six hours to prep your pilots. If you’re not there on schedule, you’ll be on your own. This is a one-time deal for extraction.”

The man hadn’t fully recovered from the shock of the confrontation. Still, he went down the practical route: “How do I know this isn’t a set-up from Intel? What guarantee do I have for my guys?”

“You’ll take my word for it because I just exposed myself as a double-agent. If we wanted you dead, we would let the Empire have you.” Cassian glared at the man, his back pressed to a cold wall. “Intel has picked up on your little piracy runs and all the credits you’re siphoning. They’ll have you spaced out soon enough. If you like breathing, you’ll defect to the Alliance.”

Tensent ran a hand over his tired face, deep lines marking the corners of his eyes. Cassian waited in silence, arms crossed over his chest. He was confident that Tensent would follow his inherent pragmatism. His decaying loyalty wouldn’t get into the way of survival. He wasn’t the kind of man to die for honor. Still, upon flipping someone, a part of the process remained uncertain. A residual mystery. Unpredictability. Cassian’s job was to minimize its interference, but it never truly went away.

The last ten percent left to chance.

“What have you been doing all those months?” Tensent finally asked, the words burning on his tongue.

“None of your business.” Cassian uncrossed his arms. Shorter than his interlocutor, he still maintained assertion over the exchange by dictating the pace. “I’ll meet you on the deck in six hours. Don’t be late.”

“Are you leaving, too?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t believe you’re that Fulcrum guy,” Tensent said, half-intrigued. “What a fucking snake. I could get _you_ spaced out.”

“You could,” Cassian conceded.

The blankness of his voice put an uneasy end to the exchange. They parted ways like strangers crossing a street, never looking back. Cassian retreated to his cabin, his fingers nervously clutched around the comlink in his pocket. He could almost feel it burning from the weight of his sins. _It’s almost over. It’s the way out. It’s what needed to be done._

Finding himself alone behind closed door, Cassian sat down on his bunk and crossed his hands in front of him. His forehead tilted forward until it rested on the warm end of that comlink. He’d spent so much time spying on Jyn’s conversations through the device, using it to achieve his own personal gain felt like an insult.

Cassian couldn’t open his eyes, fearing he wouldn’t be able to contain the trembling if he did. He needed control. He needed his voice to play the part, just one more time.

“I need you to meet me before your shift,” he recorded in his most scripted voice. “You know where. I need to talk to you. It’s important. Meet me there, Jyn.”

There was nothing else he was allowed to say.

Nothing else he had the courage to say.

Cassian sent the message and prayed that she would take the chance.

⁂

_**H-0** _

Cassian waited until he ran out of time.

Jyn did not come. He already knew she wouldn’t. He’d lost that game. He’d lost her. She didn’t want to see the last remnants of her world crumbling around her. She didn’t want to see him for who he truly was. He couldn’t blame her. He’d lied to her all along. He’d used her in unforgivable ways. And there was no doubt in his mind that Jyn had pieced it together after her talk with Frye. If she’d faced him now… nothing good would have come out of it.

Maybe, in a twisted way, was she saving them both the unimaginable hurt of looking at the mess he’d created.

He had to accept that last demonstration of undeserved, selfless love (because only love could have prevented her from getting him arrested and executed) and live with that memory for the rest of his miserable life. Nothing to be done about it anymore.

He had to leave Jyn Erso behind, the only woman he’d ever wanted to call his own, and no matter what came after, Cassian didn’t have the right to cry about it. A done deal.

Each step cost him more than the precedent, to the point where his throat started to burn, but Cassian marched on. It was a different kind of pain than anything he’d known, suffocating, paralyzing. No physical wound to keep his anguish directed somewhere. He couldn’t put a bandage on it and wait for the bleeding to stop. His mind felt heavy and numbed. The monochrome corridors of the _Basilisk_ swallowed his footsteps like a fever dream. He reached the hangar on Deck-C before he fully realized it.

The temptation to look over his shoulder felt unbearable. One last look to confirm that Jyn had shut that door forever… (oh, how _badly_ he wanted to see her standing there.)

Petrified by his own thoughts, Cassian envisioned the haunting future running ahead of him: the sleepless nights he would spend combing through intel for a glimpse of her name, the desolation of waiting to hear of her death, alone in the black obsidian space. Away from anyone that had ever cared about her. Away from _him_.

_If you cared that much, you would have put your life on the line. You’re just a fucking coward too afraid to make your own choices. Easier to follow orders, always._

But his broken mind worked hard to seal the cracks, vainly whispering: _It’s not ‘my’ fault… It’s others. It’s the war. It’s the whole fucking galaxy. Always._

_I’m fucked up. It’s just who I am. They made me that way, so I do it to others. Balance. Revenge. Someone has to. Any means necessary… The greater good._

_I’m sorry, Jyn._

_I’m so sorry it was you that night. I’m so sorry it was me._

Cassian located Tensent, starkly waiting for him on the launching pad.

_— Don’t go. You have to stay with me._

The memory of her voice lived in his mind like a death sentence.

Cassian wanted to crumble on the ground, holding his chest until he stopped breathing. He wanted to let his limbs shake and tremble, let his voice loose and scream in the face of the universe—with so much suffering that he didn’t know if he would ever be able to stop.

_— I’ll try for you._

Just another lie. The wildfire spread further in his mind. The faces around him didn’t register anymore, blurred into a homogenous background of secondary characters. Why did he stand there? Why did he do all the things that he’d done? What would be left of him when he would finally take off the gray uniform? How much farther could a man go? What if Cassian Andor could never return from the ISD _Basilisk?_

What if he’d already lost everything?

The mission was over. He’d done the impossible. He’d been the great spy everyone thought him to be—the _best_ one, one from the lost causes. He’d granted so much more than his life worth to the Rebellion. Draven wouldn’t be surprised to hear that Cassian had put a blaster in his mouth upon returning. Others had done it before him. The dirty truth buried under the silver lining of victories. The price to pay. The sacrifices of, once, good men and women.

Cassian only hoped that the last thing he’d see before pressing the trigger would be a pair of stardust eyes looking at him with longing.

_I’m so far from home. Farewell, love._

Before he could cross the hangar to join the departing team, Cassian’s brain picked up a misplaced detail. Something jumped from the depths of his subconscious like a lost transmission. He stopped and wondered. Upon closer examination, Cassian determined its provenance: stocked in his photographic memory, the black outline of a Partisan tattoo caught his full attention. He didn’t expect to encounter one aboard an Imperial destroyer, and certainly not on someone wearing a deckhand attire.

Training took over. Cassian picked up a tail on the woman as she walked towards a weapon storage unit. She readjusted her collar nervously, making sure to hide the spheric symbol on her olive skin, just a few seconds too late.

Cassian tried to project her next set of actions, wondering about strategic objectives. If he hadn’t been briefed by the Alliance, it was likely that the operation wasn’t a shared effort. Just like the Balosar sent a few weeks ago that almost blew up Cassian’s cover. Those fucking Partisans really seemed dead-set on clearing the Maw Cluster… but he couldn’t risk for the _Basilisk_ to recall its squadrons.

Cassian increased his cadence to catch up with the individual. Either he’d been too obvious about it or the universe was trying to fuck him over. She spared a rapid glance over her shoulder and their eyes locked for a millisecond. _Fuck._ Hers were dark and dilated by adrenaline and fear. The realization hit him beyond any doubt: this would end badly.

Cassian saw her drawing her hand behind her back. “Hey!” he shouted.

His mark sprung around, a blaster aiming at him. Cassian had nothing but a concealed blade on him. He jumped to the side, landing flat behind the solar array of a docked TIE fighter.

All hells broke loose on the launching deck.

From the personnel working around, few were equipped with weapons. It took chaotic moments for Stormtroopers to be dispatched and identify the frantic shooter. Meanwhile, lifeless bodies hit the floor in the middle of confused screamings. The remnant smell of oil was replaced by a coppery one, heat in the air.

Caught between the dangerous crossfire, Cassian stayed put on the ground, praying that Tensent hadn’t been shot dead. He _needed_ to catch that ride before the CIC had a chance to lock down the whole ship. So much for timing—

A sudden change of gravity interrupted his thoughts. Cassian’s body jerked up and forward. The brutal deceleration sent him against the ship’s starboard wing. He fell back down the very next second, slammed to the ground, a grunt kicked from his throat and pain in his left shoulder. The roaring sound of an explosion had momentarily stopped all action on Deck-C. Lights flickered above them like a warning. A closer explosion rumbled through the ship, sounds of crushing metal and blazing fires. For a moment, Cassian thought that the hold would break in half.

The layers of thick steel contorted but didn’t break. The familiar, low-pitched alarm of the _Basilisk_ started to ring in the swirling air like an after-thought. Pushing on his hands, Cassian stood up to witness that the Stormtroopers had managed to kill the intruder. But not fast enough.

Cassian's heart stopped beating when he realized the true horror of the situation. His first and immediate thought felt like a knife in the guts.

_Jyn._

Ignoring everyone and everything, Cassian started running towards the closest hatchway available. He latched onto the railing of an upper walkway and pushed static bodies out of his way without care, hoping to reach the CIC. Hoping there _was_ still a CIC to reach.

The blasts of the consecutive explosions had been violent enough to bend structures on the middle portion of the ship. Cassian came face to face with uncooperative doors and useless levers, forcing him to loop around for agonizing minutes. His mind collapsed into a sharp tunnel. 

People ran past him in every direction. Some officers shouted orders around, looking for working hands. Cassian passively absorbed the important intel: spreading fire in three compartments, open damages to the bow and port side, depressurization in the command center. He couldn’t begin to imagine the damages done on the upper decks.

_Fuck— Fuck!_

A terror like he had never felt before propelled Cassian through the next set of stairs.

The raging heat of a fire licked his skin while he crossed the corridor adjacent to mechanical. Blue flames erupted through a broken paneling. Metal sheets and rivets piled on the ground among a cloud of abrasive black smoke, making it difficult to see and harder to breathe.

Cassian covered his nose in the crook of his arm and pushed through without pausing. His heart pulsed at an alarming rate. He reached the far end of the passageway, only to erupt among pure chaos. Sweat pearled on his forehead and down his spine while he stumbled around the horrifying aftermath, trying to situate himself on the upper deck. Lifeless bodies lay on the floor, blasted by the explosion, torn apart. The smell of blood ricked all around. The repulsive vision of human remains barely registered into Cassian’s mind.

He had seen blood and gore before, leaving him desensitized to a point of concern. He didn’t care, dear moons— he didn’t _care_ anymore. Only her.

Cassian found the CIC entrance, or what was left of it. On the other side, a gaping hole through the many layers of durasteel opened on the crimson glow and black infinite of outer space, leaking oxygen and debris at an alarming rate. Lost to the Maw. Cassian crunched under a deformed railing to wiggle his way inside the room, ignoring the wounded and the chilling pleas for help.

“Jyn!” His scream came out broken and raw. “ _Jyn_!”

The uniforms made it hard to distinguish between victims. Some had been burned, some covered in blood. Cassian felt sick to his stomach, thinking that Jyn could have been shredded to pieces by the initial explosion. If he never saw her again—

He couldn’t lose her. Not like that. He couldn't. Not her. Not _fucking_ her.

“Jyn!”

He stood in the middle of what he imagined had been the pit of astrogation. An energy line exploded above his head, sending white sparks in every direction. Cassian startled and ducked his head. The low levels of oxygen started to numb his brain. Panic closed his throat and his lungs. Looking around in desperation, Cassian felt ten years being drained out of him at once.

A shock wave washed over him when he finally noticed the small body of an officer, pinned down by a broken conduit. Cassian almost lost his balance trying to reach her. When he kneeled next to her, out of breath and barely functioning, all he could do was to exhale her name.

Jyn had her eyes opened and fixed the ceiling without a sound, one side of her face soaked from blood.

_Alive. She's still alive._

Cassian clung to that thought like a newly-found religion. He could work with that. He was a soldier; he’d been trained to manage crisis situations like this one. He knew what to do. But never before had it been so hard to keep that visceral panic away from him in order to react.

“Jyn,” he said, glad that his voice didn’t shake. “It's okay. You're gonna be okay.”

As he spoke, Cassian loosened the leather belt from his waist and secured the makeshift tourniquet around her bleeding thigh. A piece of durasteel had cut through her skin, sticking out sharp and lethal. Possibly damaging the femoral artery.

Cassian tightened the belt with a strong pull, causing her to cry out from pain. ( _Good_ , at least she didn’t have a pneumothorax.) Her whole body trembled in a state of shock as she laid there in a growing pool of blood. Cassian reached for her own belt next, and used it as a second tourniquet, higher toward her groin, trying to stop the catastrophic bleeding. He wasn't gentle and he wasn't attentive. She didn't have that luxury if she intended to live.

“Jyn, stay awake! Stay with me!”

She was still gapping at the ceiling, shaking from pain and confusion—or what might’ve been a head injury. Cassian promptly strode over her and tried to detangle her from the crushed infrastructure. Waiting here for additional help wasn’t an option. This whole section of the ship would soon be void of oxygen and sealed off to contain the damages. Anyone left behind would be considered expendable.

Cassian grabbed her leg with both hands, brain entirely switched on survival mode, and forcibly un-impaled her from the CIC wreckage. If he thought he’d heard her screaming before, the amount of pain piercing in her voice was simply horrific. All of his hair stood up on his skin. But he didn’t stop until he had her free to be transported.

Cassian grabbed her arm. Something fell from her hand. When he recognized the unregistered comlink he’d given her, nausea turned his stomach. Forcing his feelings down, Cassian secured her arm behind his neck. “Hold on to me.”

She didn't. He slid one arm under her knees and the other under her armpits. When he pulled her up from the ground, she screamed again, voice hoarsened and weak.

“I know,” he muttered between hard breaths. “It's gonna be okay. Hold on.”

Cassian turned around and rushed back as fast as he could, Jyn in his arms. A ticking clock hammered against his skull, just as urgent as his beating pulse. He only had a few minutes to get Jyn down to medical before she died from a massive blood loss.

Cassian barked orders for people to move out of his way. Managing staircases and tight corridors while carrying Jyn proved to be a nightmare. Not as much as feeling his hands warm and slippery from her blood. No doubt that they were leaving a trail behind them as he walked among the raging chaos that the wounded ISD _Basilisk_ had become _._

When he finally emerged into the medbay, three levels lower, Cassian felt none of the relief he had hoped for.

“Medic!” he screamed around. “I need a medic!”

He wasn’t the only one.

The flow of incoming injured seemed relentless and, even among soldiers, the sudden and unexpected attack had left an atmosphere of helplessness in its wake. Medical personnel were running around and shouting orders left and right, trying to organize a triage in the middle of the filling hallway. A few droids had joined the effort, providing additional light to help the insufficient emergency red halo glowing around them. It felt like a scene captured in a field hospital, sometimes during the Clone War.

A soldier likely recognized Cassian’s officer uniform (for once in his life, how fucking glad he was to wear one!) and directed him towards one of the available units. Heavily breathing from the effort, he set Jyn down on a sterile white spread. Immediately, the immaculate fabric soaked up from her blood. She cried out helplessly when he let her go—if he had to guess, this time more from terror than anything else—as she started to realize what had just happened. Before he could move aside, Jyn gripped his jacket with a trembling hand.

She looked so fucking young under the flickering lights. Her eyes, wide from fear, stopped on him with a spark of recognition. Cassian held her wrist, feeling her pulse weak and irregular. “I'm here, you're not alone.”

A levitating droid pivoted in the air to face the patient. Cassian had to bury a shiver of revulsion, seeing the IT-O hovering above Jyn like a predator.

“Female human,” Cassian said, “twenty standard, caught in an explosive blast. She's got an open wound on the femoral and major blood loss.”

The droid sternly biped in response and spoke with a grainy voice. “Acknowledged. Please allow me to work while I stop the bleeding. I apologize for any pain or discomfort.”

It could’ve been a completely different droid. Cassian couldn’t be certain. But it was _still_ a torture droid… now working on saving Jyn’s life.

She hissed and cried under the pain of the procedure. (She _did_ have an open femoral that needed to be clamped.) Cassian wrapped a solid arm around her shoulders to keep her from moving. He would have given everything and more to trade places with her.

Jyn turned her ghostly-pale face towards him, desperate for help and comfort. He whispered words of reassurance into her hair, keeping his eyes on that droid at all times. Only when he spotted someone running by with a crate of anesthetics, did Cassian jumped aside to grab an emergency injection. He stabbed it on her good leg and discarded the empty cartridge on a trail of equipment. Coming back to her, Jyn started to blink with a delayed response to his presence. Hopefully catching some relief from her wrenching agony.

“Jeron…” she slurred.

“Don't talk,” Cassian said, brushing her hair away.

Jyn shivered with clashing teeth. “I'm scared.”

“It’s alright, you’re doing good. You're gonna be fine, Jyn.”

“Plea—se,” she choked out, tears running down from the corners of her eyes. And he knew what she was asking for. She was asking for him. _Please, stay with me._

He couldn’t. He was fucked. He needed to extract. He’d missed his window. He was running on borrowed time. Staying any longer was a death sentence.

Cassian grabbed her hand and kissed her bloody knuckles. “It's okay. I’m staying with you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Nath Tensent really defected to the Alliance after his side business was discovered.](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Nath_Tensent)
> 
> (Also, yeah, if there's a hole in your spaceship you're not sucked through it with a blender effect. You just have a depressurized environment, and granted, a shittone of problems but not that one!)
> 
> So, you know, sometimes I hate every single word I write and that's okay. Maybe I'll edit this chapter when I feel better, maybe not. If the emotions were there for you, that's all I want. I was waiting to write this last scene for so long. Part of it was already written before I started to extend the story. The settings changed quite a lot (it was meant to be on a planet, with a different pay-off) but I'm happy I've reached that point in the story! 
> 
> I'll take the bets on how fucked Cassian is at this point 😂


	9. Ethical Reconfiguration

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The moment of truth, for everyone involved.

**09\. Ethical Reconfiguration**

**›** My heart shattered apart with your sanity  
Those stars have scattered across a haunted galaxy  
Please, hold on through Heaven and Hell  
Hold onto each other or I fear we won't recover **‹**

Jyn slipped in and out of consciousness for an indefinite amount of time. Never before had it been harder to keep track of reality, her brain trapped under a cold blanket of fog. Lost into the void. Something prevented her from finding her way back. Each time she tried to surface, a weight pulled her back into abyssal darkness.

A dreamless night. A sleepless one.

Distant noises flowed around her at times. Some voices sounded familiar, an echo of memories her brain refused to access. One, in particular, felt like a stream of warmth amidst the terrifying emptiness surrounding her.

She wished she’d been able to hold on to it, to understand the meaning of those words that didn’t conjure any sense to her brain. But the everlasting presence of that voice became the new constant by which Jyn could grasp the reality of her world.

Whatever had happened, she wasn’t left alone.

⁂

_**D+1** _

The weightlessness of her body gradually morphed into a diffuse burning sensation, until it turned into a localized, sharp pain. Jyn sunk her teeth into it, following it to the edges of her consciousness. A background of chatter erupted in her brain, defeating, even in the absence of screams. ( _Screams of agony. The dying of the Basilisk.)_

Her hands passively rested over her stomach, under a small blanket. No— under a jacket. She closed her fingers around the fabric, feeling the sharp corners of a metal insignia digging into her palm. Uniform’s officer. The smell of…

“Get the cat-2 ready for transport,” someone said, “and grab any portable defib you can find.”

Transport? Where to? ( _The blast of an explosion. The ship collapsing around her.)_

“Do we have an ETA on Lexas Prime?”

“Engineering doesn’t think we can make it without astrogation. I’ve heard them talking about running aground on Mandrine.”

Mandrine. Kessel sector. Which meant: they were unable to jump. The CIC was non-operational. She’d been in the command center when— ( _Blood. Imminent death. Jeron._ )

She’d tried to comm him, to say goodbye, but she’d failed to. Then, he was—

“Jeron,” she whispered, lips cracked and dehydrated.

Someone moved next to her. A hand lightly pressed to her shoulder. She turned her head towards it, still too weak to open her eyes, but she didn’t need to see to recognize his voice. “Jyn,” he said, the length waves of emotions washing over her to soothe her restlessness. _Relief. Home._ “How do you feel?”

“Hurt.” Even the monosyllabic answer felt like a gigantic battle. She whined as his hand disappeared from her shoulder, wishing she had kept her mouth shut. But the touch returned within seconds, brushing her hair on the side of her face. It felt so nice, contrasting with the agony of her body.

“I think the anesthetic ran out. I’ll try to find you another dose of symoxin.”

“ _Stay_ ,” she gasped with irrational fear. Her throat hurt just from the word. Cracking her eyes open, she mapped the blurred contours of his silhouette, hovering above her. His hand pressed against her cheek gently, caressing her skin with his thumb. She wished she’d been able to hold him closer, but she couldn’t find the strength to move her arms. She held onto his jacket instead, heavy against her worried heart.

“You need to rest,” he said, low and reassuring tone. “Close your eyes.”

She wanted to argue with him but keeping her eyes open proved too much of a challenge already. A disappointed sigh left her throat. She didn’t have the energy to cry, but the profound helplessness she felt wrenched her guts. Too vulnerable, too weak, too fragile. What would happen to her now? What would happen if—

“That’s it,” Jeron said. He carefully tucked his jacket under her chin, voice closer to her ear. “You’re a brave one. Try to sleep. I’m not leaving.”

Oh… If he stayed with her then, surely, nothing bad could happen anymore.

 _I feel safe when you’re here._ That’s what she wanted to tell him. All she mumbled instead was: “ _Aler’shevai_.” —as her mother used to tell her, so long ago.

⁂

_**D+3** _

Jyn caught herself with a hand on the wall, swallowing the painful grunt trying to make it past her lips. She clenched her jaws harder and took another step forward, using the piping system lining the corridor like a handrail. A light sweat quickly broke on her nape, waves of discomfort radiating from her injured leg and spreading through her entire body.

She’d been told to stay put, to lie down and play dead, to _facilitate_ her recovery. The synthskin and compressing cast holding her leg from falling apart were doing a decent job at the task already. She didn't intend to be an unnecessary burden when resources and hands were stretched to such a critical point. Walking herself to the showers wouldn’t kill her (and she couldn’t possibly stand the hygiene crisis any longer). Besides, she needed to move to avoid a fatal blood clot.

At least, that’s the excuse she planned on feeding Jeron in case he woke up and noticed she’d slipped away. He wouldn’t be happy about it, but she had little guilt about her deception. He needed to sleep or he would drop dead faster than her.

Halfway through her sluggish journey back, Jyn recognized a man walking in the opposite direction, arms busy with high-grade portable sonars.

“Endicott,” she called, stranded in the middle of the walkway.

The lieutenant paused upon hearing his name, the slight delay of recognition making Jyn wonder if she looked _that_ bad. “Blast, Erso,” he said dryly, “you’re alive.”

Any other day, she probably would’ve been offended by such a reaction. Right now, the exhausted emptiness behind Endicott’s glare was as strong a testimony as it could get: this wasn’t an insult. Probably a relieved statement, even. Yes, she was alive. _Some_ people were alive. Not that many from Command… Both Mullinore and Feneri had been killed, and with them, half the chain of command, leaving the ISD _Basilisk_ adrift in the hands of too-little experienced officers.

“What’s all that for?” Jyn asked, eyeing the sonars.

Endicott gave her a disapproving look—the same type of look he used to gratify her with when she challenged his authority in the CIC. Today, though, “We need a semblance of guidance if we don’t want to obliterate what’s left of her.”

“I can help with astrogation,” Jyn said.

The man scoffed at her. “Weren’t you, like, _dead_ three shifts ago? You look like you shouldn’t even be on your feet.”

“I’m breathing,” she deadpanned. “That’s good enough for now. Hey, did you hear anything from Frye’s squadron? They were comm’ing just before…” She trailed off, unable to vocalize it.

Endicott pursed his lips. “You don’t know? It’s been confirmed by Intel, simultaneous attacks. Their mission failed. Rebels took the facility.”

Jyn’s mind entered a fatal dive. Her grip on the piping neared painful, scarring her palms on the hard metal. “Any survivor?” she heard herself asking.

“Frequency’s dead. You can pour one out for them.”

Eager to cut on the subject, Endicott resumed his journey, a last nod of acknowledgment for her sake. She didn’t try to hold him back or to gather more information. For one, she doubted he had anything more concrete to offer—and she wasn’t sure she could take it. The shaking of her limbs had nothing to do with pain anymore.

Jyn faced the wall, her breathing erratic. She closed her eyes, willing herself to stay calm, to stay composed. Hardly effective. A blinding rush of anxiety swept through her. Her chest burned. Her head heavier, ready to burst open.

— _I hope I'm wrong, he's a good laid. But if I die on that one, someone will have to make something of it._

It couldn’t be a coincidence, could it? She had all those pieces… now perfectly fitting together, while praying they _wouldn’t_. But she had held off on joining him, as he’d requested, till the last moment… till she knew for sure. Until she could say that her instincts were wrong, that Razana Frye was wrong, that Commander Jeron Sward was loyal to the Empire.

_He saved you._

_Is it enough? Enough to trust—_

All those people, an entire squadron, half a ship… so many more than she knew of, she was certain. Jyn pressed her throbbing forehead to the cold durasteel, fighting back a sobbing plea.

She had to be wrong. She _had_ to. But how would they have known about Frye’s mission? And how would they have known to synchronize an attack? How would _he_ have known to comm her right before… trying to lure her away— or maybe, maybe… to silence her? No—

He could’ve left her for dead.

He could’ve gone away.

Pushing from the wall, Jyn marched on as fast as her body could carry her, ignoring the stabbing pain in her leg. By the time she reached the officer’s quarters (where she’d relocated to make room in medbay), she was out of breath, her back drenched in sweat. By mere happenstance, Jeron walked out of his cabin at this exact moment. From the look on his face, numbed from too little sleep, she presumed he was looking for her.

Jyn came face to face with him, blood pounding into her ears. She watched the darkening shift in his gaze as he registered her expression and her stomach dropped. She could’ve tried to ask questions. To explain the inexplicable. To rationalize and to seek a satisfying explanation. But the second she noticed the way he looked at her… the way he stayed silent, didn’t ask ‘what’s wrong’ or ‘are you okay’... the way he simply waited for her to _say_ it.

She wanted to punch him with desperate rage.

“You’re a spy,” Jyn said, feeling her heart shattering apart.

“Yes.”

The crude, straightforward admission cost her a heartbeat.

He didn’t _even_ have the decency to look surprised or to deny it.

One simple word and the last pieces of her world crumbled around her, turning into dead and cold ashes. Disaster in progress. Maybe more so violent than what she’d experienced during the bombing, because this time… this time, it hurt her _soul_.

“All this time… you lied to me.” She could barely push the words out, nausea rising in her throat. “Everything you've done… everything you said… I slept with you, I gave you— And you, you just… you _used_ me? For _this_?”

“I'm sorry, Jyn”

“You’re _sorry_?” she said, barely short of a scream. “You’re sorry for the people you’ve killed, or for being a piece of shit, or for getting caught? I can’t believe— I fucking let you… I wanted… I’m so fucking stupid! I defended you in front of Frye, and now she’s dead because I lo— ” She choked on the words.

“It’s not your fault,” he offered, inexplicably. And she wanted to rip his guts out for trying to comfort _her._

The nerves of that scum. How could he be so calm?

“Did you have fun toying with me?” she spat at him. “Why did you come back for me? Just so you could keep your cover a bit longer? To see how many people were left alive? Did you ever plan on killing me if I got too noisy?”

She didn’t want an answer to that, but he gave her one anyway. “I’ll never try to kill you.”

She ignored every cue, from the cracks in his voice to the looming darkness in his eyes. “Why not? Every corpse we spaced the last three days, did they deserve it? Because they were on the wrong side? Am I not _Imperial_?”

“I don’t expect you to understand,” he said through gritted teeth.

The haughty condescension unleashed her fury, at last. She pushed his shoulder with a violent blow, causing her own body to absorb the shock on her wrong leg. The sharp stab of pain only heightened her searing anger. Control slipping fast, “I wish _you_ were dead," Jyn screamed, "so I’d never had to find out what a fucking piece of shit you are!”

She saw it in his eyes: the exact second everything fractured inside him. The irreparable damages she caused. The abject sentencing. Jyn witnessed the unbearable trauma, the void of darkness she’d freed.

Unable to access her empathy, she couldn’t regret the words.

Jeron stood motionless in front of her, not making any attempt to escape her. “Me, too.”

Jyn wailed. Emerging on the other end of the passageway, the black uniforms of Naval Troopers caught her attention. She didn’t hesitate. She didn’t have a choice. This couldn’t end any other way. This was the _right_ thing to do.

“Troopers!” she screamed. “This man’s a traitor! He’s a rebel spy!”

She half-expected him to run away or to take her as a hostage. He stayed perfectly still, looking at her with those same ageless eyes she knew would haunt her for the rest of her life. His expression one she couldn’t begin to understand. Resigned. Tired. _Relieved_.

“My name's Cassian,” he simply said. “I love you.”

Jyn opened her mouth over a silent gasp. She barely had time to feel the impact of his words, devastating.

Already, he reached for something dissimulated in the collar of his jacket. Her brain was painfully slow to realize what he intended to do. She watched him as his fingers moved to his lips, ready to swallow a small cylindrical pill.

“No!” Jyn screamed and jumped into action. Her hand hit his arm with so much strength that the pill slipped from his grip. Jeron— no, _Cassian_ looked at her with a horrified expression. Stars freeze over in the infinite galaxy.

“Why did you do that?” His distressed voice cracked over the words.

 _I don't want you to die!_ Jyn thought instinctively.

She recoiled, breathless, facing that terrible fact. No matter what she’d said, no matter how she wished she’d been able to feel about him… in front of the dreadful irreparable, she couldn’t blind herself with lies. And if the treason hurt so deeply, it was because her heart couldn’t bear to lose him. No matter what he’d done, no matter how wicked and tainted he was, saying _goodbye_ was the worst pain she could ever have to go through.

Jyn realized, all too late, that she had just condemned him to a fate far worse than instant death. And she couldn’t undo any of it. She stepped aside, powerless, as troopers tackled the unresisting man to the ground. And now, _now_ she wished he’d rebelled, escaped, fought back. Now she wished she hadn’t broken his soul, just like he’d shattered hers.

_Are we both gone beyond repairs? Is this the last of us? Together or separate— Gods, what did I do? What did I do to the man that pulled me back from that cold and silent death? I'm sorry. I’m sorry for betraying you like you betrayed me._

_I’m sorry I didn’t stop you before. I’m sorry I didn’t see you before. Maybe I could’ve changed it. Maybe I could’ve saved you, too._

_Forgive me, my love, whoever you are._

⁂

_**D+5** _

Jyn went through her lines of code for the hundredth time. Cramped behind a hatch door, her bad leg awkwardly sticking out just so she could fit on the side of a processing unit, cables and datapad in hands. That deep frown of concentration hadn’t left her forehead for the past forty minutes. Hair stuck to her neck, under the rough collar of a mechanic jumpsuit. The air vents kept blowing hot air in her face as she worked.

One mistake and everything would go to hell. Time to see if she was really _that_ good.

Jyn scanned her calculations, brain spinning like a hammer drill. Vectors viable. Trajectory conclusive. Timing sensitive. A short window of action. A six-hour blackout due to planet rotation. It left little to no margin of error for life support, but the alternative was far grimmer.

Jyn sliced in the corrupting elements, mentally praying that the firewall wouldn’t pick up any of her work. She’d done her best with her current clearance level. She could hardly get a hold of Mullinore’s fingerprints nowadays. She’d considered ranking up beforehand, but with both the CO and XO positions filled so hastily, and given the current condition of the _Basilisk_ , she truly doubted that the new recipients had received a new set of clearance codes already.

A virtual attack didn’t constitute a top priority concern, simply because there wasn’t much to attack anymore. Without an operational CIC, the Star Destroyer had been rendered to a harmless cruise ship (disregarding the Starfighter Corps, that is). But Jyn wasn’t trying to hijack a turbolaser turret, and her lack of offensive actions might have been the saving grace of her operation.

After an ultimate verification, she disconnected the datapad with sweaty palms. She couldn’t waste more time on theories.

Jyn wiggled her way out of the maintenance log room. She put the datapad away and slung a black bag over her shoulder, stepping out of the shadows.

Deck-E was silent. Only the vibration of the solar ionization reactor rumbling through the damaged carcass of the _Basilisk_ to keep her company. She passed through a set of doors without looking back, acting as if she had a legitimate reason to be here. As if she wasn’t wearing a uniform that wasn’t her. As if she wasn’t about to throw her life away.

She wondered, very briefly, what her father’s reaction would be.

Jyn scanned the forged ID card and waited for the blaster-proof door to unlock in front of her. She set foot into the brig and retrieved the blaster from her bag at the same time. Without pausing, she fired at the two Stormtroopers on guard duty. The white armors fell to the ground with a disturbingly soft sound, both stunned by the discharge of power.

Doing her best to keep her focus intact despite the sudden terror crawling under her skin, Jyn moved to the row of cells, looking for the correct identification. She’d never been down here. She’d never expected to be unless she found herself in real trouble… How ironic. She didn’t have the heart to laugh about it.

She quickly skimmed through the bloc, finding the man who had spent so much time on the other side of the line, now confined behind thick duraglass. Jyn forced the cell to unlock, sliding the blaster into her belt to free her hands.

If she expected to discover him in bad shape, she hadn’t quite prepared herself for _this_.

Lying on his side in a corner of the room, Jeron— fuck, _Cassian_ kept his eyes shut. His face didn’t look quite right anymore, maybe in the angle of his nose, his skin bruised and bloodied. He had his arms crossed over his chest, knees drew towards him, as if trying to trap some residual warmth, although the air wasn’t cold.

“Hey,” Jyn said with a hoarse voice. She couldn’t bring herself to use any of his names.

Where her presence hadn’t sparked up a reaction, her voice did.

Cassian cracked his eyes open (as much as the bruising allowed) and weakly tilted his head to look at her. Flabbergasted, he braced the weight of his body on one arm, trying to push himself upright. The effort visibly cost him. Something painful dug at her insides, seeing him in such a state of misery. She forced moisture back to her lips.

“Get up,” Jyn ordered.

“What are you doing?” he asked in disbelief, craning his neck to see past her.

She frowned. “Get the fuck up, now!”

He complied and stumbled to his feet, holding his flank, shoulders hanging low. Had he always been so flimsy? The black undershirt seemed to eat his body away, the lack of uniform disturbingly insulting. _It’s not his uniform to wear, he has no right to._

Jyn stepped back, interrupting her thoughts before they got too loud. “Come with me.”

“What are you doing?” he repeated, this time more urgent. Alarmed.

“You saved me, I save you,” Jyn stated. “So we’re even, and I’ll never have to think about you ever again.”

_Hardly a lie; I’ll probably be dead by tomorrow. Let’s get on with it._

“I can’t let you do this,” he argued. He looked disgusted by the idea. “Not for me.”

That stupid son of a bastard. “I’ve already done it,” Jyn said, losing patience, “so don’t make me drag your ass and fucking move!”

Whatever objections he had, he didn’t voice it and decided to follow her. Jyn handed the tactical bag over when he stepped out of the cell, reaching for the blaster again.

“What’s that?” he asked.

She spared a quick look in his direction. “Survival kit.” Jyn tapped her palm against the control panel. The negative air pressure followed them as they exited the jail section. No firing squad intercepted them on their way out. They probably had a couple of minutes before someone discovered the breakout. It was all she needed to get Cassian on his way.

Walking close by her side, he glanced at her a stressful amount of time but kept his mouth shut. Small mercy. Jyn stayed focused on her destination, using maintenance corridors and backdoors as much as possible. It might have been the circumstances, but the few times they crossed paths with other personnel, no one even blinked at Cassian. Seeing injured crewmates might have been the new norm these days. It made her sick to the core, knowing what she knew.

“Here,” she said, opening up an airtight hatch door. On the other side, lining up against the small concave space, a series of escape pods waited to be launched.

Jyn went straight to unit AR-778. She snatched her datapad from the bag he still carried and nodded for him to enter the pod. Cassian paused in front of her, a hand braced against the hatchway. Something glistened under the veil of pain fogging his eyes. “Why are you doing this?”

“I already told you,” she cut. “Get in.”

He looked at the pod, breathing harder, and focused back on her. His hesitation irritated her to no end. They didn’t have time to sit and chat. She needed to fly his ass off that ship ASAP.

“Get in!” she insisted, pushing his shoulder. “It’s now or never. You’ll crash on Randa. There’s an emergency beacon in that bag. Wait for another six hours before using it. We shouldn’t be able to trace it, then.”

“Jyn…” His body shifted towards her.

She took a step back as if pulling her hand away from a hot wire. “ _Don’t_.”

“They’re going to kill you,” he said, ignoring her warning. “You know that.”

“Get in that fucking pod.” She was light-headed from the rapid beating of her heart, blood pressure rising.

“I can’t leave you here.” He swung the bag inside and grabbed her wrist, almost a painful grip. “I can’t let you die for me. Come with me.”

A pathetic sound escaped her. She made an attempt at twisting her wrist free but he didn’t let go. She wouldn’t have thought possible for him to have much strength left. She was seconds away from punching him all the way to the escape pod. If she hadn’t been in such a precarious state herself, she could have manhandled him into cooperation.

“Don’t act like you _care_ ,” she cried. “You never— Just get away from me!”

“Come with me,” he insisted. His voice came out strong, dark, almost menacing. Giving orders. And for a perilous second, she wanted to listen to him. _I love you. Come with me._

“I can’t!” Beyond the ethics, there were technical limitations, too. Those pods were conceived for a single user, way smaller than the dual models stored below the flight deck. Less maneuverable, too, but thanks to the simplified interface: significantly easier to hijack. Hence the initial choice. She’d never thought it would have been an issue.

She never even envisioned having such a choice. Why would he want her to come? She was the enemy. She was—

“Yes, you can,” Cassian dryly said. “I won’t leave without you.”

He tugged at her arm with surprising vigor and she stumbled on her feet, the datapad almost slipping from her hands. Jyn's eyes widened with a mixture of fear and irritation. That insufferable shithead really made it extra hard to save him. Were all Rebels so fucking aggravating? But the trepidation inside her chest… the _almost_ hope…

“I _can't_ ,” she snapped again, now on the verge of panic. “Not enough resources, the life support… for both of us— ”

“Shut up, Erso.”

Without warning, Cassian dragged her inside the small escape pod and she fell on his lap, bracing herself with a hand on his shoulder. The other still clutched her precious datapad over her chest like a lifeline. He hissed from pain under her weight but didn’t pause. A single kick from his foot on the door panel sealed the escape pod before Jyn had any time to react. The close smell of blood and sweat alerted all her senses.

Despite his miserable state of being, Cassian still managed to handle Jyn like an obedient child. He forced her to settle with her back to his chest and clipped the security harness over both of them, so tightly that she could barely breathe. Gods, this was going to hurt.

Cassian circled an arm around her waist, his labored breathing directly huffing against her cheek. “Now?” he asked.

Jyn looked at her screen, irritated to see a little blurring motion on the monitor—until she realized it wasn't a display issue, but her own hands shaking.

The flight vectors still matched her calculations. Everything looks ready for separation. If she had successfully hacked the security system, no one would notice the single rogue pod escaping. If not, they would be blasted into melted metal in a matter of seconds.

At least, she wouldn't die alone, she stupidly thought.

“I launch,” Jyn said, her voice ready to break. She pressed the command on the control panel and held her breath, feeling the single seat under them vibrating with the rest of the shell. It wasn't built for two people and, despite sharing a harness with Cassian, Jyn was thrown forward by a brisk rotation. Cassian caught her with both arms just as the datapad hit the floor.

“ _Shit_.”

The next moment, her stomach jumped in her throat as they were violently launched into space. She had never experienced a sensation as brutal. All of her simulation exercises had been… quite breezy compared to the horrifying velocity of a real emergency protocol.

Unable to keep her eyes open, Jyn gripped Cassian's forearm with all of her strength. She couldn't speak, she couldn't breathe. Her whole body painfully vibrated against him. Her injured leg was on fire, a stabbing pain crawling up her spine, causing her to moan. If they survived long enough, they would both be bruised from the experience.

Jyn counted the seconds in her mind, waiting for an abrupt ending. He didn't let go of her.

Seconds eventually stretched into full minutes, and Jyn could still feel the claustrophobic confinement of the escape pod. Still not dead. Something biped on the on-board monitor. She audibly gasped for air.

A maddening strength almost dislocated her neck when they collided with the planet's atmosphere, retro-propulsors flaring up. Cassian grunted behind her, absorbing Jyn's impact on his body like a sponge. More dizziness. Until, finally, a hard collision brought them to a full stop.

The disorientation was total. A deafening silence buzzed into her ears, still dazed by the experience, then gradually faded away. Jyn started to register some inboard sounds again. Hydraulics stayed locked. No alarms, no apparent structural damages. She blinked into sheer darkness, the red glow of flickering electronics around them to discern some shapes.

She had the exact same feeling after having to partake in a boxing session. Everything hurt. Her thigh was sticky, the leg of her jumpsuit stained with a dark color.

“Slow down your breathing,” Cassian said.

Only then did she realize how hectic she was gulping for air. She made an effort to regulate her heartbeat, the steady rhythm of his chest to guide her. Jyn didn't want to risk breaking the confinement of the escape pod until proven necessary. Exposure to the elements seemed like a disgraceful way to die after all this. But with two people, the oxygen reserve would run out way before anyone could reach them…

This wasn't her plan. She wasn't supposed to be here, with _him_.

With careful movements, Jyn unstrapped herself. She stirred on his lap, awkwardly moving around in the small space. She managed to turn on her side to take some pressure off her leg. Pressing a hand to it— yes, definitely blood. Hopefully, it only needed a few more stitches. She could hardly remedy the situation for now.

Her head bumped against his shoulder, unwillingly. She tried to maintain some distance, uncertain and frightful, but her body couldn’t handle it. With a foot pressed against the opposite side, Jyn rested against his shoulder and closed her eyes again, exhaling from beyond the core. He put an arm around her and that, too, she couldn’t fight.

Sinking into Cassian’s protective embrace, she tried to believe, as long as he held her, that her fate could be something different than utter despair.

Deep inside her heart, like a tainted secret, she wished she’d been with _Jeron_.

Amidst the agonizing silence, Jyn had all the time in the galaxy to realize the consequences of her actions. Too late for remorse, now. She’d committed treason against the Empire. She could never go back—she’d lost another empty home full of ghosts. Was it worth it? All for him—or for her conscience.

She would be meeting with Rebels in a few hours and she had no illusions about what she could expect from that. She had killed so many of them while at her job, they would probably return the favor. Not before extracting any useful information from her first, she figured. Would they torture her or just ask nicely? Would Cassian do it himself? Like he used to on the _Basilisk_? Was it the reason why he had wanted to take her with him?

What _was_ the reason?

“No one's going to hurt you,” he said.

She was ashamed of his ability to read her mind like an open file. Although, unsurprised. He’d probably spent months profiling her.

“Don’t lie to me,” Jyn asked, exhausted beyond anger.

“I’m not.”

“I don’t believe you,” she breathed out. “I don’t believe you anymore.”

“I know you don’t. I know you’ll never forgive me.” His head drifted to her, giving the impression that he lacked the strength to keep it up. They pressed close, foreheads touching, holding on to each other like the lovers they weren’t anymore. The heartbreaking statement barely tempered how desperate they were for that touch. Minds and bodies disconnected.

“I hate you,” she said over a sob.

“I know.” He frowned, his arm tightening around her waist. “I know, it’s okay.”

Jyn fisted his shirt with one hand, barely stopping herself from hitting him. So much anger. So much hurt. How to live with that, when she’d planned on dying instead. She was drained to the core, a sun gone cold. The emptiness growing inside her chest swallowed everything she thought she’d found in him.

 _Lies_. It had been lies all along.

“I fucking hate you,” she said again, suffocating. His lips brushed the crown of her head. He wiped the tears off her cheeks with the pad of his thumb. Jyn circled his neck, hiding her face against it, overwhelmed by the smell of his burning skin.

She never wanted to leave the escape pod. She didn’t want to face what would come next, for her, for them. This moment was the last equilibrium. A stolen in-between where she could still hold him and cry over how much she loved him.

“You’ll forget about me, Jyn, I promise. I won’t matter anymore.”

_Shut up. Just shut up!_

“But you belong with us,” he said. “You belong to this, you’ll see. And you’ll do something about it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The opening lyrics are from [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=te_tlyqSXa4). 
> 
> This chapter is kindly broad to you by [Castiellover77](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/view/castiellover77) who requested that I worked on this. Allow me to say how grateful I am for the support and how mind-blowing it is to me that you love this story so much! Everybody, say a big thank you to this lovely reader, please!!! ❤️❤️❤️
> 
> I hope all of you enjoyed this long, tumultuous chapter sprinkled with lots of angst and longing. It WILL get better, I promise. And this is definitely not the end of the journey! ;) Tell me what you think about Jyn's reaction!


	10. Standing by (Part I)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cassian Andor needs a hug.

**10\. Standing By (Part I)**

For the past eight hours, Cassian had tried to convince his brain that anything south of his collarbones wasn’t part of his body. An old trick from one of his rogue instructors, learned during his days as a CIS soldier. What could you tell a kid with a shattered leg to make it less excruciating while waiting for a medic that wouldn’t come? The leg registered as an isolated component. The pain was to be compartmentalized. He would be fine. He wouldn’t _die_.

Somehow, it helped.

With a bit more practice, he was able to rewire his mind to support the idea. To isolate any pain. To keep on functioning beyond a normal threshold. To keep him moving until the next extraction point.

Trapped in a decaying escape pod, with no means of self-extraction, no ETA, and nothing to keep his brain focused on, the trick didn’t perform anymore. Everything hurt beyond critical, courtesy of his time inside an Imperial cell. They hadn’t held back. He wouldn't heal on his own, that was for sure. Cassian could only think of it as fair play, repayment for his contribution onboard the _Basilisk_. Fate spitting in his face.

Physical agony was the perfect companion for that of his mind.

_(You should be grateful. She’s out. She’s safe. Instead, you’re lamenting over what you lost. What you couldn’t have in the first place._

_Never yours—)_

_No, Jyn was never mine. Jeron doesn’t exist anymore. The end of the line._

Cassian entertained no illusion. Once they stepped outside that pod, they would be strangers anew. No more blissful lies. He would stay away from her if he had any pride at all. He couldn’t beg for forgiveness after what he’d done to her, and would never try. She deserved his last remnants of integrity, if only for saving his life with such reckless bravery.

_Go on, Jyn. You’ll do great things for the Rebellion._

_Maybe I’ll get to tell someone… ‘yes, Erso is brilliant like that.’ Shining like blazing stardust in my fucked up darkness. The sweet drug in my mind… Or maybe I won’t ever get to tell somebody. I’ll be dead soon enough._

_It’s agonizing holding you here. The knowledge of a final time._

_If we could go back… If we were fast enough, time would move backward. I’d get to meet you again. I would do things differently and become your ally, I tell myself while knowing I wouldn’t. I would always be the liar. And I would always fall for you. Constants of the Galaxy. It used to bring me comfort; now it's just another wound._

Torturing himself with such thoughts was the least useful thing he could do.

But Cassian Andor’s usefulness had forfeited eight hours ago.

⁂

When help arrived, half a day after initial contact, a struggle over directives broke the sanctity of his last respite. They weren’t sure what to do about Jyn. Cassian tried to explain her presence to the best of his cognitive abilities but it didn’t weigh much in the eyes of the team leader. Jyn Erso was marked as hostile and, despite her degrading physical condition, threatened as such: blindfolded and bound for transport.

Still, Jyn was in need of medical attention—and they wouldn’t risk wandering off their path for the sake of her. It was decided that she would be brought back to base with Captain Andor.

Another distant shock, numbed by the abyss of his mind, passed through his system when Cassian realized that ‘back to base’ didn’t mean ‘back to Dantooine’ anymore. He’d missed so much of what had happened to the rest of the Galaxy, trapped in his world of shadows, scattered intel fed to him by fragments, that Cassian had virtually as much knowledge as Jyn when they pierced atmo.

A stranger among his own people. (Did he even have people left?)

With a grim effort, Cassian staggered to his feet, determined to walk off the U-wing transport by himself. Jyn, on the other hand, had lost too much blood to be able to stand without support. A pair of rebels grabbed her under the armpits, her wrists still bound in front of her.

“She’s a defector,” Cassian reiterated, watching them handle her like a _prisoner_.

“I heard you,” the mission leader—a man in his late thirties sporting an anesthetic scar across his lips and cheek—replied. “She’s still going to be processed.”

Not much Cassian could do about that.

He knew someone would look at her leg and make sure she was in shape before being interrogated, but he wanted to be there every step of the way. _Physically_. A stupid impulse. She wouldn't forgive him just because they were being nice about it. She wouldn't forgive him, full stop. No use staying around like a lapdog.

He had his own debrief with his CO to attend. Protocols to follow. Meaningless things to perform in order to regain some sense of self.

All of it seemed inconsequential. Parting with Jyn without being able to see her face, to look her in the eyes one last time, felt like the hardest step yet— for Cassian knew, the next time he'd see her, they would be strangers anew.

⁂

“Tensent?” Cassian asked, his beat-up body painfully supported by the back of a chair.

The air in the room stuck to his skin, warm and heavy, suffocating with moisture. The many electronics cramped inside dark spaces, cables running along corridors from distant power sources like serpents, constantly blew out hot air, adding to the offense. No temperature control inside the Massassi outpost; everyone walked around with sweating spots on their clothes. The ground felt uneven under his feet, rugged, dusty. Nothing hummed and buzzed in the bones, only the occasional echo of natural fauna piercing through tunnels of ancient stones. But for the most part, Cassian could _hear_ the silent baseline of a planet.

The disorientation was total.

The gravity, too, was different— heavier. His limbs ached, blood pooling in his feet. His heart tired. He breathed as if jogging while his ass stayed put on his seat. (He worried about Jyn. Worried that the increased gravitation made it harder for her to heal and _—No. Someone will set her with a proper binder. Stop. Focus._ )

“An agent intercepted the squadron three days ago. They’re confined to Arda I for now,” Draven said, his face an expressionless canvas. “Your opinion?”

“They will perform. Tensent is in it for his own skin, but he’s a great pilot.” Cassian pushed the datapad away from him, eager to distance himself from the last deeds of _Jeron Sward_. “Maybe given some time, he could get around to actually care.”

“We need the pilots, anyway,” his CO flatly commented. “Here’s to hoping he does a few useful runs before blowing himself up.”

Cassian stayed silent. He had no real affinities with Tensent. Anything that happened on the _Basilisk…_ stayed behind. Anything except—

“The girl,” Draven picked up, leaning forward. “Why?”

“She got me out.”

“I can read, Andor.”

Cassian cleared his throat. He resisted the urge to shift on his seat, knowing Draven would add it to his evaluation. Hard to trick a man who taught you the tricks in the first place.

The older spy hadn’t been on the field in recent years, confined to tactical rooms and executive functions—someone needed to pull the ropes somewhere, someone needed to make sure the machine kept running, and senior officers couldn’t be picky about their jobs. (Not that many senior officers to begin with; they went where numbers were needed.) But Draven wasn’t working in Intelligence by mere fortuity.

Attentive blue eyes kept monitoring Cassian’s reactions.

“She’ll make a good element,” he said. “Astrogation, scouting. Either on flight support or logistic runs. From what I saw, she’s more skilled than half our current techs.”

“All very nice— but again, I can read.” The man crossed his arms over his chest. The flimsy brown shirt he wore wrinkled in the crease of his elbows, stained darker by sweat. “You picked her for her father.”

“I picked her for easy access,” Cassian corrected. “I didn’t think she could be recruited. My mistake.”

His CO twitched in front of him. A frown appeared on his face, hard to tell if it was from concern or annoyance. “Do you know how many times I heard one of my agents say those words?”

“Can be counted, I imagine.” _—because when we make mistakes, we die._

To Cassian’s surprise, Draven then moved from his spot, reaching over the octagonal holotable to turn off a recording device. Off the logs. _Concern, then._

“How deep are you?” the man asked in a low voice.

Cassian considered his answer carefully. Not for fear of repercussion; there wouldn’t be any for crossing too many lines. That’s what frightened him the most. The _lack_ of consequences. From another mission, he might have accepted the hand offered to him by a trusted mentor. If he extracted sooner, maybe. If he still felt inside his guts the tinge of burning, resilient _hope_ that kept driving him farther all those years. If he still had the certitude he could make a difference somewhere.

Now—

“Make sure you don’t pull the wrong move on Erso. Don’t alienate her. Give her some time and she’ll be valuable to the Rebellion.”

Draven had enough respect for him that he didn’t sigh in his face. His lips painted a downward arch. He chose not to probe further.

“I’ll keep that in mind, Captain. I advise taking some time to remember your own value. Might help avoid any more mistakes.”

A beat flew by. Without intonation, Cassian asked: “Who did you put on my suicide watch?”

“A friend of yours.”

He snorted. “Always punching down.”

Gathering the datapad and the transponder in one hand, Draven said without an ounce of sarcasm: “If it can dissuade you, no trick’s too dirty in my book.”

 _You should see my book,_ he thought _._

⁂

Spies traveled light—or so the rumor had it. Cassian couldn’t say he was an exception to the rule; he hadn’t left much on Dantooine.

The worst loss had to be a pair of brown leather boots. Cassian, like the rest of this disheveled Rebellion, didn’t have many credits to spare. Not much of a uniform supplier for him and his peers either. Decent footwears were left to one’s appreciation and hard to come by in the ranks. Oftentimes even trade-off against other, smaller commodities.

Someone might have packed the boots and the rest of his equipment prior to moving to Yavin IV. Better serving another soul than being left behind for Imperials. He couldn’t say he was overly attached to material things but, when he found himself assigned to yet another empty room, he regretted those scarce possessions.

No spare clothes to hang. No personal effects to shelve. Not even a holograph. Nothing reminiscent of _Cassian Andor._ Starting from ground zero once again.

The space was small—smaller than Sward’s quarters on the _Basilisk_ —but private. A bunk almost at ground level. A thin blanket neatly folded on top of a bare mattress. No other furniture apart from a transport crate doubling as storage space and multipurpose table. Clean. Functional. Nowhere to hang a noose. Not much else to see. Nothing _else_ to see: the room was barren of windows. (This bothered him the most.)

_…while laying with her under the Maw Cluster’s amber glow and red giants…_

Cassian marched on and put down his welcome-back package: a stock of painkillers, a toothbrush, dry soap, and a new comlink (monitored for the time being, as per protocol). He could have requested to borrow a datapad, browse news on the holonet or contact people, whatever he was supposed to do to kill time. He still might, later.

For now, he opted for lying down on his cot, the blanket bundled under his head as a pillow. He'd declined anything more than primary treatment for his injuries. He didn't want to spend unnecessary time in medbay. That left him with residual pains that could've been avoided but, really, even now, didn't he have the right to—at least—feel _something_?

He didn't sleep, but he drifted away.

He chased after her with his thoughts. Jyn Erso had been a lot of things to him during the past months—from mark to asset to lover to obsession to complication. What persisted after that, he didn’t have a word for.

From a rational standpoint, he knew his lust was a maladaptive coping mechanism engineered by his brain. It was easier to analyze, now that he wasn’t Sward anymore. Even as Cassian, he mourned the loss.

When he’d said ‘I love you’, he’d been true, coping mechanism or not; maybe it was still. But Cassian had loved others before without ever letting it affect his job. It couldn’t explain everything. Staring at the dark ceiling, he tried to narrow down the source of his agony. What he wanted from her… wasn’t love.

What he wanted was _absolution_.

A pathetic sound bubbled in his throat. He closed his eyes, feeling the room moving off axis, just like the rest of him. What would it take to repair the damages done by his collision with Jyn Erso? He could watch her, from afar, make sure she assimilated, make sure it hadn’t been for _nothing._ Or he could take an escape route. Maybe that would bring her some closure; the least he could do for her after all this.

It seemed as much a good reason as any other.

The door opened without his authorization, locking mechanism temporarily disabled. (He'd lost his right to privacy for at least forty-eight hours.)

“Ahoy,” a pleasant voice called, “still alive?”

“Against my will.”

Cassian opened his eyes again and sat up, ignoring the protestations of his exhausted body. For a moment, there was gladness in the proximity of this friend. It’s been such a long time since he last saw Melshi. The man looked rougher, a dark scruff on his cheeks, harsh lines around the eyes—but he smiled without artifice as he stepped inside, unaffected by Cassian’s morbid humor.

“Happy non-death, then,” he said, “I brought gifts to celebrate.”

And indeed, Melshi slung a heavy duffel bag from his shoulder, landing it at Cassian’s feet. The man cradled a bottle of something in his left hand, a thumb slid through the handles of two tin cups. He set it down on the metal crate and sat next to Cassian, squeezing his shoulder with a crushing grip.

“You look like shit. Let’s drink.”

It felt— nice. ( _Fuck Draven._ )

“What’s all this?” Cassian asked, curiously peeking inside the travel bag.

“Your stuff, well— what’s left of it. I came in a bit late but I won back the jacket at sabacc.”

Cassian hadn’t expected to see the blue parka again. He ran his fingers over the crinkled white fur, feeling something that belonged to him for the first time in forever. (Under his digits, under his derm, under his veins.) He placed it aside carefully and kept digging inside the bag, increasingly surprised. He found a pair of pants ripped at the knee that he hadn’t had time to mend before flying off, old tactical gloves, a few shirts, blaster parts and a thermal scope that had survived immersion on Chemvau, a leather jacket with a bloodstain on the sleeve and a metal insignia pinned through it.

At the bottom of the pile: a sturdy pair of black combat boots.

“From Maddel,” Melshi told him. “She said it should fit.”

For a moment, the words evaded Cassian. He turned his attention to Melshi and asked: “She’s around?”

The man shrugged and poured the bottle’s content into the cups. “No idea. Last time I saw her, she was catching a flight to Lothal with Dodonna. Here—”

Cassian accepted one of the cups, feeling a little dent on the surface where he rested his sweaty palm. The translucent liquid smelled like kerosene and shone like oil reflecting sunlight. “What’s that?” he asked with a doubtful eyebrow.

“Life juice.”

They clinked cups and Cassian rinsed his throat with it. Immediately, the burn traveled through his esophagus, all the way to his stomach. He coughed on the back of his hand. “Why? Because it _stripped_ you of it?” With a little grimace, he considered the rest of his drink. “Who brewed that shit?”

“A guy from SpecForces. You get used to it after a while; it’ll win you over.”

“Unlikely. That’s the worst moonshine I’ve ever had,” Cassian said dryly.

Melshi laughed, unimpressed. “You say that because you still have taste buds.”

They kept drinking in silence, then. Cassian let the bootleg alcohol annihilate the rest of his organism, hoping that it would reach his brain, eventually.

“It’s good to see you,” Melshi said after the second round.

Cassian nodded once. All he could do to offer the sentiment back. “You don’t have to babysit me,” he whispered. “I won’t do anything on your watch.”

“I’d rather you would. At least I could try to intervene.”

That discussion might have been awkward with anyone else but both were passed that point. Mutual recognition between soldiers. The kind of bluntness forged from traumas. Useful, sometimes. Cassian had no energy left to pretend. What he broadcasted to the rest of the Galaxy wasn't a composite anymore. He was relieved Melshi could handle it without a flinch, even the ugliest parts. It made it a little easier to breathe.

“I’ve heard Intel talking about some kind of records,” his friend mocked. “You’re almost famous. I mean— you would if someone gave a shit about Intel.”

Cassian let out a breathy laugh, sarcastic. “I’m devastated.”

“That’s why I brought the booze.”

Humor left him without transition. He stared at the dancing liquid inside his cup, the corners of his mouth arching downward. His fingers curled tighter around the tin, trying to suppress the sudden trembling. “It was a bad job.”

“Shred it off. Whatever acting you did—”

“You think this is acting?” Cassian cut off. Anger pierced in his voice more than he’d like to admit. “Undercover is not acting. If you want to live, it has to come from you. This was _me_ , all along, just looking through a different prism. A version you don’t want to know. Somebody you wouldn’t drink with.”

Cassian tasted ashes in his mouth. He could still feel the weight of the Imperial uniform on his shoulders and hear the sound of his footsteps inside the _Basilisk_. He could switch clothes, switch names, switch sides… but he couldn’t shred his _skin_.

Those memories didn’t belong to somebody else. But it felt like the Rebellion did.

“Good thing I’m drinking with you, then,” Melshi said to drag him back to the present conversation. There was slight concern in his undertone, as if he was asking a question. He still surprised Cassian, asking next: “Want to talk about that woman?”

_No, I certainly don’t._

But he said, voice like a knife: “ _Jyn_ ,” because she wasn’t ‘the girl’ or ‘that woman’. She deserved that much. (She deserved so much more.) “Do you know who’s scanning her?”

Melshi scratched his neck. “Nioma, I think.”

 _Shavit_.

⁂

Cassian stayed hidden inside his quarters for the next few days, only stepping out to perform basic hygiene. Unwilling to mingle with others just yet.

Melshi came and went, every few hours or so, making sure Cassian was still breathing. They usually talked for a bit, usually not about something too meaningful. Keeping it light and easy to navigate. They joked about trivial things, about shared anecdotes. And it worked; it took his mind off the darker thoughts swirling inside his brain— but only as long as his friend stayed.

At one point, Melshi brought Cassian some foodstuff that wasn’t MRE, trying to lure him to the mess hall without success. _Later_ , Cassian said.

On the second night, Cassian asked if Melshi had an unused datapad on hand. Laying in the dark with only a screen to illuminate his face, Cassian logged into the device. He was likely still being monitored by Intel, since they hadn’t cleared him to have any weapons around yet. But Cassian wasn’t after any sensitive info to trade-off in the unfortunate event he’d been flipped by the _wrong_ side. He didn’t even want to send news out there.

Instead, he typed a quick search and pulled out the first result he found.

> Aler’shevai — _dialect_ , Aria Prime; an affirmation of affection or love, usually reserved for family members and spouses.

He abandoned the datapad and curled on his side as if he’d been kicked in the stomach.

A silent sob agitated his chest. Then another, louder. Soon enough, Cassian found himself unable to stop. For the first time since he could recall, he faced the wall in shame and kept crying. In the hollow of his ribcage: a throbbing, acute pain. And through his pathetic meltdown, the only thing that he hoped was for Jyn to hold him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! Welcome baaack! It's been a while since the last chapter, I know. Thank you so much for being patient with me, I'm doing my best and hoping I still have readers for this story! 🥺❤️  
> I know it was a sad/heavy chapter, which is part of the reason it took me so long to write. The next one will be from Jyn's side and I promise it won't take four months this time!  
> Feel free to tell me what you think about this chapter, if you liked it, if you hated it, if you wanted to hug Cassian to pieces (my bet)! I appreciate all your support SO MUCH, kudos, comments, keyboard smash, everything! Thank you! ❤️❤️❤️


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